You also don't shut down a game that's making money. The question is whether investing in EQ1 is a worthy investment. I believe it's the only investment in EverQuest IP that makes any sense at all. EverQuest 1 is growing again. You nurture growth - not neuter it.
I can agree with at least some of this, and it is probably why some speculation of having EQ use the Forgelight Engine (used by Planetside 2) has been surfacing - added to that the original version of EQNEXT had at least 1 screenshot shown at Fanfaire in 2011 using that Forgelight Engine before they moved to the Cartoon looking graphics they later did a big reveal of. If Planetside 2's engine were adopted for their library of games then Daybreak already have an in-house team with knowledge of it they can leverage. This would probably be even better than buying a 3rd party engine in terms of costs, moving to the Unreal Platform or the Unity Platform would not even be necessarry. The problem is the way that EQ's assets use non industry-standard proprietary methods and so much of the original files those were built from were lost, moving all of those assets over to a new engine has been needed for a long time but that's not going to be an easy process. If it is accomplished however so many possibilities can be opened up. Would EQ (maybe even EQ 2 as well) moving to the Forgelight Engine be better than a move to Unreal Engine? I think so, while it may take a bit longer to pull it off I think the results would be far better for the company and the game, having multiple titles functioning from the same engine would leverage massive savings on tech budget across those multiple titles & then upgrades to that singular engine can benefit the entire range of titles using it.
I think the planetside2 engine is better optimized for massive battles(like 1000+ players in a single battle) than the other off-the-shelf engines. That means they could make raids with a strong focus on crowd-control. Imagine the Lceanium raid with actual army-sizes and huge swarms of sokokars...We would need some bigger lazers! It might also solve the server-lag problems, if some of the planetside2-server tech is migrated to EQ.
