GAMER LOUNGE 20XX (NO CASUALS!!)

[Kitsu]

For example, the last Wario Land game (Shake It) and WarioWare: Smooth Moves) were released nearly two years within each other on the same console (the Wii).  Both of them co-exist in Nintendo's eyes and the newer series was never meant to "replace" the older series.  It's like how both Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi are still going strong (even with both series ending up on the same system at one point) despite them both filing under the "RPGs starring Mario characters" tag.

Since that point, there have been 3 new Wario Ware games and no Wario Land games. It may be a very short-sighted way of viewing time gaps of ~7 years between entries as meaning the series is dead, but it still happens.

In a similar way, when X-Com was first announced as getting a reboot as an FPS (instead of its tactics roots), old fans got pretty upset, afraid that they were going to be left with nothing new for them. Of course, later, many were overjoyed when the TBS X-Com (Enemy Unknown) was announced; but then purist fans got upset that the new game was actually still a pretty far departure from the original in its actual execution, to the point that they jumped ship to Xenonauts.

Basically, whenever something like this occurs, people can overreact and think what they liked will no longer exist. Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong. Sometimes they're half right and half wrong. But either way, from a marketing/PR standpoint, it can be a thorn. Whether it's a worthwhile thorn or not depends on the final results though.