A relaunch in general as it says is a relaunch of a game, rather than a completely different new game. The path in my opinion to take would not be that different from say the Withcher enhanced edition.
The key of a relaunch would purely be to make enhanced changes be seen as a big enough change to be worthy of review or rereview by the press and communities. And through for instance a slight name change start from a clean sheet in terms of reviews when looking up on the game on metacritic or google.
The main things to get that a succesful relaunch to happen will mean a few things imo:
- There must be enough additional new content and fix ups to be worthwhile for a major newspost or rereview on gaming/gamer websites. Just bunching a lot of small previously released patches together does not give the news worthyness boost for websites to post up on it. So whatever happens you must have a big addition of stuff at one point of time, to give a big bang that makes people notice it.
- Like with the releases of regular game, there should be marketing to try and get communities involved and somewhat hyped up again. Before the big thing happens the entire world should know of it, while perhaps allowing reviewers early access to the changes. Websites want to tell new and special info that cannot be found elsewhere exclusive access is important for that. (like announce a huge fix list, loads of new content, prices for a competitive tournament, announcement of a map creation contenst, and a price reduction).
- All faux as possible should be made to make it appear as if it's truly something new, including in terms of name when people google the game. Which is why you often see stupid things added to a games name (Game of the Year edition, Gold edition, Enhanced Edition) to show a game went from version 2 to 2.5 and made a major jump. As well as to simply obtain different reviews when people search for the game. While cheesy some name like Red Orchestra 2.5 - The new Heroes of Stalingrad, will make people consider it as a different game from Red Orchestra 2 - Heroes of Stalingrad, while when searching for the old name you can probably quickly find links to the new one. Of course in case of a big revision change in the name it must be able to live up to it.
Tripwire keeps the metacritic scores on their game steam store page, the one for HOS is not that good though (especially the user score which is the thing i personally always look at), obtaining a new metacritic score would likely bring some new buyers.
Like the witcher:
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/the-witcher
and the witcher enhanced edition:
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/the-witcher-enhanced-edition
- If the game is a fixed up better game then let people try it out and see for themselves. Together with combined marketing. If the game is truly good and works well without too many issues, then people will tell. Logically if the game is not what it should be people will tell as well.
- Usually price reductions can go nicely together with a relaunch If HOS goes from its current near full retail price of 45 euro (digital deluxe price), and take of a nice permanent cut (+ temporarily special action). Then that often will help bringing up interest as well. If anything the game needs to change from an overall negative opinion on other websites to an overall positive opinion, combined with loads more people actually playing on servers.
At least this is how I personally view those things. In the end I guess it would be look at what worked well and what didn't work well. I at least know that the relaunch with UT2003 and The Witcher were a good success.
Both showcased a major addition of cleaning up the existing things, and adding a lot of new content. In the end a successful relaunch depends on how the press and communities will respond if at all to the news.