[michaelcampbell]

> Couldn't they just keep working on the original game, which already worked really well and lots of people loved?

Of course. If history (and "IME") is any guide, this was all marketing and product manager driven. Creators of all stripes now create the thing THEY want, not the thing paying CUSTOMERS want.

That's perhaps overly cynical and sometimes this is not the case if some new set of features can't be easily done in the architecture of the original, of course.