The fact that companies shut down popular games due to their profit simply not being as high as projected is just stupid. (note I said profit, not income. In the case of CoH, the game was 100% making profit still when it was shut down).
If you give me 100, and I make a profit for you of $0.50 a year on it, it's profit right? But this other investment, investment B, makes $5/year. Which one are you going to put your money in?
Investment B every time.
The companies don't want profit, they want the MOST profit - especially because if they don't choose wisely, they'll find it difficult or impossible to seek extra financing.
I guess it could lead to bad marketing for the studio or original publisher if the game itself is filled with bugs that you won't fix.
I'm not sure that's super likely with COH, but history is full of revivals of IP that looked long dead at some point.
This is so ass backwards it boggles the mind. If you want people to buy your new game, make it better and/or different than the old one! Otherwise you're wasting everyone's time, including your own.
Making inferior new products and complaining when they can't compete against superior older ones is more than a little boneheaded. If your new stuff isn't good enough, go back to the drawing board! Anything else is parasitic rent-seeking that should be viewed by all with disdain.
When you're running a franchise properly, the success of a product should only help your bottom line in the long run. If you're looking at it as a threat to new business, you made a wrong turn somewhere and you need to figure out where it was so you don't do it again.
What really chokes me about CoH is there was no franchise - the world has been dead since the game shut down, expect for the cruel necromancy of Statesman in MXM.