Yes, obviously a big part of it is that every studio is hoping for their game to become the next WoW or Fortnite or Destiny— a franchise that will print money for a decade with not much more investment than a few content drops a year.
But I think the expectations of players have changed too, as far as matchmaking, leaderboards, progression, anti-cheat, anti-abuse, etc. You just can't deliver these things in a consistent way with the distributed client-server model, and companies needed to own the end-to-end experience vs farming out the community management side to faceless volunteer guild/clan/server operators.
Yes, obviously a big part of it is that every studio is hoping for their game to become the next WoW or Fortnite or Destiny— a franchise that will print money for a decade with not much more investment than a few content drops a year.
But I think the expectations of players have changed too, as far as matchmaking, leaderboards, progression, anti-cheat, anti-abuse, etc. You just can't deliver these things in a consistent way with the distributed client-server model, and companies needed to own the end-to-end experience vs farming out the community management side to faceless volunteer guild/clan/server operators.