Not true.
For Indies, they actually need their game to not only generate enough revenue to cover their expenses but also produce enough revenue that the studio can hopefully be funded for future development, whether that be DLC for the game they just produced or future projects, and unfortunately, many Indies simply don’t get enough to cover their studio moving into their next game.
For games owned by publishers, they need to make enough money to cover their expenses and make enough to meet the expectations set by the publisher. What these expectations are varies wildly depending on the publisher and who owns them. But when it comes to funding for their next game or funding to keep the lights on while they brainstorm pitches for new games? They don’t have to worry so much about that because the publisher/owner normally gives a studio enough money to keep running during those lean years where they’re not releasing anything.
I don’t know of any publisher that requires future games to outsell or outperform the last one. Obviously it’s nice when that happens, but I can’t recall a single publisher demanding that happen, otherwise we’d have heard about that by now, especially with some publishers like Activision and EA making franchise games where the next game in the series doesn’t always outperform the previous one, and yet, those games are still seen as profitable and financial successes, they’re not viewed as failures.
And I’m going to stop you there because we’ve literally been told, by developers, why MTX is a thing.
Before MTX was a thing, what game developers would do is hire a full team for new game development, then after the game was released, they would fire most of the developers except for a skeleton crew who would maintain the game for a few years before they were moved to other projects. This made game development one of the most volatile industries to try to get into, because your job had zero security, you were never guaranteed a position, and it might take you a considerable amount of time to find a new position after you were made redundant at your old one simply due to how many people were scrabbling as they tried to snap up new positions as they became available. Only the largest, most profitable publishers could afford to keep full development teams on the payroll.
MTX changed all of that. After publishers realised that it was relatively cheap to make new MTX content and they could sell it and make a decent amount of money from doing so, they were able to not only hire full teams of game developers but also keep that talent. Sure, layoffs would happen occasionally, but at least in the early years of MTX that was fairly rare, at least for most publishers. EA was the notable exception there because they had a habit of buying studios, taking the best developers from those studios and firing the rest before closing the studio down.
The reason MTX really took off is because it was viewed as a means to keep studios funded and continue generating profit. Without that revenue stream, we’d be back where we were before. With the majority of developers having no job security and being forced to fight amongst each other for new positions. Only the wealthiest publishers/owners would be able to keep game development teams running through lean years.
And yes, Blizzard was one of those developers, in case you were wondering. Mike Morhaime was quite frank about the financial woes that Blizzard went through before they were snapped up by Davidson & Associates, back when they were called Silicone & Synapse. Were it not for Davidson & Associates, Blizzard would never have existed as a studio, because they would have shut down due to running out of money.