Seems like an episode structure was perfect for hitman...,

[Jesb]

What happened with this philosophy of doing a episode structure for these game's. Seems like a missed opportunity here. They built a beautiful game and I think it goes well with an episode structure. I assumed that this is what they'd do after the first one. Why didn't they just do a season 2, season 3, ect. Keep new episodes coming and make the base game have endless content.

 

[Crazymoogle]

A lot of reasons?

• HM2 was still episodic. Just that they sold the initial episode count to WB and released it as a season set. Financially this was a big deal after Square-Enix cut ties, and now IOI can stand on their own.
  
  
• Having a netflix-like app that just supports all of their content forever is extremely difficult with games, because the footprint of the core engine is huge, and changes can break things. It's a tremendous QA commitment that can't be done without the backing of a major studio or tons of money. In that sense it was way safer to go backwards and patch Season 1 into Season 2 than it would have been to build season 2 within season 1.
  
  
• Honestly, money and visibility: Hitman doesn't make League levels of money, and can't afford to have an infinite content train. So they still did episodes with a year of content, and then they stopped to presumably work on season 3 (among other games).