They will, because they didn't make PoE 2 any different. It's the exact same game as PoE 1, and will have the same fate as a result -- in 10 years it's going to be all about the zoom zoom and screen blasting maps while the core of the game never changes while 200k of us play league after league because we're fucking idiots.
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The list goes on. It's all the same shit packaged differently. They could have made PoE 2 a game much more for the masses in a long-term manner. I do feel PoE 2 has done ridiculously well, but I've been reminded that we're exceptional gamers in terms of getting through the campaign in 1-2 days versus the dad gamers that are legitimately going to take 2 weeks just to get through the first 3. When the game is fully released, I feel a lot of people will come back, but after that, we're not going to see 550-600k people on steam anymore for it.
The game is just too much grift for the mass-market long-term. I've spoken to several people that LOVE PoE 2 but cannot wrap their head around why on earth they don't let you lower your particles and that the particles "lag [their] pc". They can't understand why there isn't a sort button, and cannot understand why trading is made so hard. They don't understand why they need to click on six things to accomplish six different tasks (vendors/well) and why so much bad loot drops. Those are the kind of issues that's going to keep them away from the game long-term. These players don't mind these issues now, but they will when its the same, constantly and when PoE2 inevitably becomes PoE1 these gamers aren't going to be able to keep up anymore.
I agree completely. My ARPG/POE bros defend porting existing systems over but my view of the game has changed 180 degrees from the first 72 hours. I appreciate there being some challenge/difficulty to the game, even very hard bosses, etc.; There is a difference, however, between challenging and hard, and SO MUCH of the "hard" in POE2 is just cumbersome process or artificial scarcity. Its only scarcity at low levels, though: Once you get to Maps/Atlas, the items and currency spigots open.
Item progression itself is a joke. Of course, if you use the official trading website, you can get anything at almost any time in the game you want at stupidly low prices. Just not in the game itself, because, as I have been told, GGG wants to make this difficult (to not have it be 'frictionless')? Which it isn't for old hands but for people new to the game or from a design perspective, its total and complete ass. You just can't craft them yourself: see the artificial scarcity above.
I am just ranting now, my "Son I am disappoint" manifesting on the page because I felt like GGG was going to be different from Blizzard and the shitshow that has been D4 and all the terrible design decisions made regarding that game. Instead, its just a different set of decisions around which stupid/incomprehensible determinations have been decided.
Of the top 3, I think Eleventh Hour games has the best design philosophy with perhaps somehow the 3rd place game? I liked/loved Last Epoch when I was playing it, including the Early Access but haven't thought about it in a while; I like the gameplay/animations of POE2 but every supporting system around the game is terrible; and Diablo 4 is fun in the moment to moment gameplay but Blizzard is suffering from American California AAA-game studio disease, with corporate bloat, Woke/DEI BS, and shareholder KPI metrics comorbidities.
