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I think there's a general misunderstanding of what it means to be a Developer in this industry, and particularly in this genre.

Developers make games. They are part of a creation team, going from nothing to final shipped product at launch. Their tradecraft is design documents, speccing, sub-contracting, writing, managing pipelines, all that thing, and all for the joy of building something from start to finish. To finish.

MMORPGs are never finished, but they absolutely launch, and in that regard, to a traditional video game developer, they are absolutely finished. The system is in place. The features are in place. The sandbox is set for an immeasurably amount of new content to come for the foreseeable future.

Effectively, it's done. Now it just needs to expand.

Is that as compelling as giving birth to a new game? No. Maintaining and expanding a game is not as much of a birthing process as it is a maintenance one, at least to those who make the games.

Therefore, it should be assumed that the creators will move on once their creation is done. New content for an established game just isn't as interesting as a new game.

That's what I think has gone on here. And I think that because it goes on everywhere. Blizzard has not got anything on their docket at this point. They don't need to. WoW will paint their houses with cash for some time to come. Without even a hint of a new game, and in fact, without any such hint since the moment they hinted about WoW, what possible reason is there for a new game creator to stay?

It's like stand-ins in the movie industry. I certainly wouldn't want to pay Harrison Ford his hourly fee (plus the guild rate cards) just so I can have the camera crew do a light check :)