They knew it, they simply did not care.
As I said ages ago, they rushed the release for a quick cash grab.
Which are all without exception not on a live-service basis.
And outside of D3 all the other mentioned ones are on a live-service basis.
That should tell you everything you need to know why the cadence there is as it is 
May I suggest that people don’t consider your statement just an assumption when you start a sentence or paragraph with “Truth is”?
A good way to indicate an assumption is to start your sentence with something like “I assume” or “Probably”.
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That was entirely my point.
Grelwing said “the average arpg has 3-4 month seasons”, and I listed 6 ARPG’s that don’t have seasons period, therefore the “average” arpg doesn’t have 3-4 month seasons. As more than half of the relevant ARPG’s don’t even have cycles/seasons, and if we really want to nitpick down to every possible arpg that’s ever been made, the vast majority do not have seasons. So his statement of “the average arpg has 3-4 month seasons” is technically false.
I explain here:
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I wonder, is there any non-seasonal ARPG with not declining population?
PS Oh, actually Grim Dawn’s population looks somewhat stable.
And Undecember, now (not at first).
It is also worth pointing out that Diablo 3, Diablo 4 and Undecember all launched in a “complete” state, and added seasons later on (too fast in Diablo 4’s case, but that’s another story).
That leaves only PoE, Torchlight Infinite and LE as games going for seasons off the bat. A rather small panel.
It is however correct to state that within this tiny group of 3, LE is the only one not submitting to a regular season schedule.
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Didn’t PoE also launch w/o seasons? I don’t care for the game and barely know anything about it, but I remember DJ and, I think Llama? Talking about how it started as a campaign based difficulty game like TQ, D2, and LE where you’d repeat the different acts on harder difficulties and the current version was made later. I just assumed that meant seasons were also added later, but again, I could be absolutely wrong.
Grim Dawn and D2R are the only two. Yes, D2/D2R have “ladder seasons”, but they’re not the D3, PoE, D4 style of seasons, just ladder resets with the label of season slapped on.
So beside D2, only Grim Dawn is successful on this path. I think it might be due large number of mods. Instead of getting refreshed content with new league mechanic like in PoE, people are just exploring new mods when they want a new content. Ofc, they also releasing updates sometimes, but that alone probably wouldn’t be sufficient to keep the playerbase.
That, and the fact that Grim Dawn is a greatly polished game, with another expansion coming soon.
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When I started playing PoE, it was indeed a short campaign (4 acts I think?) that you had to repeat three times with increasing difficulty before reaching endgame.
And there were already seasons, with weird and funny mechanics introduced temporarily every 3-4 months.
Later on, they jumped directly to a 10 acts campaign with no repetition. It was a completely separate process from the seasons, that kept happening before and after the campaign switch.
Since people can’t stop talking about other Arpg here (just like in most other topics for whatever reason) and I see some innacurate infos, here’s a little history lesson about PoE :
The first Challenge Leagues were Anarchy and Onslaught in june 2013, in the 0.11 update. It was 6 months after the arrival of the third act (with the 0.10 update). For a long time, GGG was running 2 simultaneous challenge leagues, one softcore, one hardcore. Each with their twist.
4 months later (in october 2013), they launched their 1.0, which added a “final boss” for act 3 (Dominus) and 2 new challenge leagues (Domination and Nemesis), among other things (Scion class, maps, uniques, etc.).
The 1.1 (march 2014), 1.2 (august 2014) and 1.3 (december 2014) all came with 2 leagues each.
The fourth act came in the 2.0 version seven (!!) months later, in july 2015, with a huge amount of content.
They switched to the 1 league model in the 2.1 version 5 months later, in december 2015. That was the messy Talisman league (and I’m sure some veterans here shivers just thinking about it).
And in august 2017, they added acts 5 through 10 in the 3.0 version, removing the Cruel and Merciless difficulty levels. It was their biggest content update yet and their peak player count at the time with 98k concurrent players. That launched with the Harbinger league and the Pantheon system.
Such great memories.
Excep Talisman and Archnem, of course. 
On a sidenote, I want to say that even if there was 5-7 months between some leagues or updates, that felt a lot shorter with the frequent races (some where just 1 hour-who can level the highest, some with weird twists like “Start with one of those 5 uniques”) and the few PvP seasons (or even the battleroyal experiment). I miss those things so much.
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Yeah, for PoE 1 you’re wrong there. PoE already had 2 leagues pre-release and kept a constant schedule up post release. Sure, with a few days or a week difference in-between but outside of the current situation during the PoE 2 release there wasn’t any very major outliers to date. Generally 13 weeks per league.
Partially for sure.
My thought is that the main reason for GD’s success is the proper handling between campaign-size, the itemization pace as well as post campaign content and top-tier min-maxing content. There’s a lot to do in the game in a vanilla form already and mods obviously increase the replay-value substantially on top.
In comparison in D2 there simply wasn’t anything available beyond the 3 difficulties but the min-max potential was very high, allowing for gradual progression at any time.
It’s the weakpoint of LE since that’s a part which ‘speaks’ to far less people if it’s missing. Some enjoy it more though… but they’re in the vast minority overall.
Everything so very true.
The count of missing elements/features in the “1.0” release is insane :
.Incomplete story (and that means no fire Rayeh, Immortal Emperor or True Orobyss in the Monolith)
.No advanced skill tooltip (so you have no specific info on REAL crit chance, multiplier and damage conversion)
.Sets almost completely useless (apart from a couple of items, but you do not fulfill the idea of a COMPLETE set)
.Huge class imbalance (ex Falconer vs Forge Guard)
.No 3D models for unique armor pieces (but that will never come)
.The sorting mechanic in stash still awful (vertical instead of horizontal).
These are all issues that can be solved with time, but they reflect the state of an highly incomplete product.
1.0 should represent a stepping stone from which a project can expand after addressing its major problems, instead after getting the first major roadmap detailing the specifics of the 1.2 1.3 and 1.4 updates, we revert to to a new roadmap with 1.1 CHECKED, 1.2 planned for nine months after the previous update and MANY THINGS FOR THE FUTURE…
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I mean, I wouldn’t call them the only successful ones.
Victor Vran, Titan Quest, Torchlight 1 & 2, and Chronicon are five other games off the top of my head that were successful but they just aren’t really talked about. Mainly because Victor Vran and Chronicon are niche, Torchlight had a major flub w/ Torchlight 3 and Infinite is following the Diablo Immortal plan of basically being a freemium mobile game to my understanding, and Titan Quest is 18 years old w/ Grim Dawn being it’s spiritual successor.
Of course, I didn’t mean that it is the only successful ARPG. Just wonder, what it takes for ARPG to sustain a playerbase in the current gaming environment.
Who cares about population in offline games? wtf
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Players who like to get new content in the game they are playing and want to enjoy the game during long period of time. Like, wouldn’t you want to get more content in LE? The amount of content you will get is related to the population. Constant population means constant support, so devs can constantly make new updates. In case of Grim Dawn, population also determines quantity and quality of mods.
What you are saying is who cares if LE will die for good, if you can play it offline.
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Keep ur heads up. Ur doing great.
Imo as much as i dont like the long wait. I have to say i think it was the right move. Fix things up polish ect will make the game better as well as for the future.
All of u at EHG have carved out a really nice spot of the genres market by sitting right between poe and diablo3/4.
Stay strong keep improving this area of the market u all have worked so hard to carve out.
It’s actually been growing over the past few months.
No, it had seasons before it “launched”, whatever you consider that to be.
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