Bannerlord will be released and a shit ton of people will play it actively. You have to understand that there is a complete difference between the multi-players awaiting Bannelord and the single-player ones.
Most of M&B Warband copies sold are held by players who don't have a single clue these big multiplayer communities exist. On top of that, among these big multiplayer communities, a huge amount of these players don't play it 'actively' meaning they don't commit to structures (regiments / clans / factions ..) or if they do, it's not for a long time. NW is the big exception because it's a DLC which doesn't have a single-player campaign, therefore, you can expect that amount all the players who played it, an interesting part got dragged into regiments and contributed into keeping NW active for all these years.
You can legitimately expect a good part of the 27,627 members to have at least 'experienced' a regiment of some sort once simply because the most active board on the NW section of FSE is the community one (by a large margin).
For instance, the same reasoning cannot be applied to Native because the Taleworlds forum consists of numerous board fully dedicated for singleplayer mods or vanilla and out of the 207,811 members registered, you can be certain a large margin only created an account to figure out a question about the single-player or eventually went to play a casual multiplayer server once or twice.
The native competitive community is also the most 'professional' in their way to approach the game but due to very limited the number of players making it active (and because TW never gave two fucks about it until very recently) it never had a way to make a breakthrough.
Yes, between a player being active in a multiplayer community and one only looking to play the single-player, it is undoubtedly the first one keeping the game 'alive'. But TW's policy and marketings have shown us that they do not seem to understand or care about the potential of their multiplayer scenes. For one 'multi-player' claiming they have lost all hope in Bannerlord and won't buy it once it gets released - assuming they actually follow up with their claim - you will have 10 new players buying it because they saw a Youtube video two months before and are looking to play a 'cool medieval game with large armies fight and other decent looking mechanisms/features'. Most will never hear about the multiplayer part of it. And most of those who do will never get involved in clans or other similar structures because they won't understand the interest of doing so, or how it can multiply your fun and bring you a completely different experience.
But effectively speaking, for Taleworlds, it represents one key lost for ten keys won.
Talesworld are incompetent cucks who got a lucky hit single and are now just milking Turkish tax money for as long as they can before they release GlitchLord out to the public for $59.99 with 3 maps and 5 DLCs to be released at month long intervals.
Talesworld is subsidized by the turkish government for the sole purpose of bannerlord.
