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I don't know the statistics of revenue for poe 1 and 2, but I stopped playing poe1 (in standard, not league) because my characters kept getting nerfed.
I dont want to repeat the same thing 1000+ times to be back at the same spot.
I understand that people in league can make significantly better characters and earn more rewards, but I like to play at my pace.
Years ago, before poe 2, when ruthless was announced I considered that it would inevitably influence the standard game and make it less interesting over time.
Then slowly the game stopped being interesting for me.
I never had the zoomy characters, but they were not exactly slow. Now they were. Slow, weak and getting one shot randomly.
The nail in the coffin was when GGG nerfed headhunter (indirectly).
Chris Wilson is no longer at GGG, and while I have not heard what happened, I believe he did mention that the day headhunter gets nerfed, he wont be at the company.
The game is not horrible or anything like that, but it's no longer for me.
Because of this, i do not even want to try PoE2.
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I dunno, there's a lot of misinformation here.
HH is still incredibly strong and regularly used in top-end farming builds. The culling strike foulborn HH is about 75% the cost of Mageblood despite MB being a much more flexible item (fits into more builds).
In Sentinel, GGG decided to replace the old miscellaneous mods with the previous league's Archnemesis system. As I understand it, this was at Chris' direction. Ultimately this was a failed idea and they largely went back to a system similar to the one before. During this period, rares essentially just had their archnem modifier(s) instead of a grabbag, though each archnem mod was equal to about 5 mods from before. The problem was really just in sustaining your HH mods.
As a result, GGG changed HH mid-league (changing uniques mid-league is very rare for them to do outside of outright exploits / instability). Now, it grants buffs for 60 seconds (formerly 20) and they reworked rares to diversify what was spawning in each area. HH immediately skyrocketed in price that league. Even after the demise of archnem mods, those buffs persisted.
A few additional times down the road, Chris dropped the ball keeping track of what ended up being major changes to the game that caused quite a bit of player backlash. The big Kalandra nerf of league mechanic drop quantity/rarity is one that comes the mind. He put out a post later basically saying "it was communicated to me, but I dropped the ball by not understanding the impacts this would have" and they had to do all kinds of damage control.
Anyway, fast forward a number of years later and this is when Chris finally quietly steps down in the background. Mark took over as the POE1 game director (Chris has previously been both POE1 director and CEO) and there was a year or so of transition going on in the background. If anything, it was probably multiple cases of dropping the ball and being worn down from community backlash that precipitated it.
Chris has his own YouTube channel now, and while he hasn't talked much about leaving, he has said that part of it was that being a CEO was never really his passion and that he wanted to get back to the actual development side of making games. He's started his own small studio and is making what sounds to be an ARPG, though there are basically no details available.
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Standard is just a weird ecosystem in general. Your characterization is actually backwards, though. You can make much, much, MUCH stronger characters in Standard than you've ever been able to in a league due to all the legacy modifiers and crafting options that exist in Standard.
You end up with two types of players there, with one just wanting to do their own thing at their own pace and others wanting to make the craziest shit imaginable using hundreds of mirrors worth of legacy items. I'd say it's the latter that thrives because you're right that the regular balance changes do make it hard to consistently play a build over a long period of time.
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EPT
