Quote (D2JSPUserII @ Dec 15 2018 10:36am)
If the developers of Median XL; instead developed their mod to be an "Act 6" rather than a total conversion and added multiplayer support for their "Act 6" they eventually would have drawn enough of the player base to rival LoD.
This reason is important to mention because that would have provided financial incentive to Blizzard to essentially purchase from the modders the premade expansion (and all rights to it) for cheap, and sell for profit under a second expansion cd-key.
The precedent for this development model has been set with other developers like Valve whom in the past outright paid modders for full rights to their mods, and then resold/updated these mods in to their own expansions/games.
Valve didn't just buy the rights from the modders. They hired the best talent from those teams to develop and continue the project.
They did that with team fortress and DotA
The reason median or path of diablo or annihilus or d2pk or d2ga or Asgard doesn't have as strong of a following as d2 isn't because they're somehow worse than d2. It's an overall better game experience. People stay on d2 because they don't like change and they want to get lots of fg. If blizzard made a new expansion everyone would whine about how it ruined the game the way they did when LoD came out