Here’s why:
- Many past WoW players have moved on with their lives and are no longer interested. They might have been in college or high school during Vanilla. Now they may have families, jobs and kids.
- Many past WoW players have no interest in playing Classic. They’ve already been-there-done-that.
- Many past WoW players won’t want to pay $$ to resubscribe to a game with ancient graphics and gameplay when they could play a modern new game like Final Fantasy or something else.
- Many past WoW players don’t even know Classic exists.
- Retail Players all know about Classic.
- Retail Players are ALREADY paying $15 per month for a subscription which includes classic. Essentially Retail players get it for free, while everyone else has to pay $15 per month.
- The market for Classic is probably very small. Yes, perhaps 50 or a 100 million players have played WoW at some time over the years. But if all of them were only interested in Vanilla WoW how come we don’t see 50 or 100 million people playing on Pirate servers?
As far as WoW being an old-school RPG … it’s not and never was. Yes there are a lot of quests, but they were all fairly simplistic and there was never much in the way of plot.
True “old-school RPGs” like Neverwinter Nights and Baldurs Gate I and II had much more in the way of “RPG” than WoW ever did.
Vanilla WoW also isn’t that much different from Retail WoW in how the quest experience plays. Apart from having actually useful quest rewards, extra help on the map, and unified quest hubs, questing in WoW today plays a lot like it did back in Vanilla.