Personally, I don't think either comparison is valid. These two items are nowhere near comparable to the original comment. With tennis if you don't move, you can't play. With the examples I gave above most of the game would remain available to the player, just in a single player or PvE environment. Survival RPG's can easily be made either SP or PvE only, Dune actually came super close, they just decided to heavily limit the end game PvE compatible areas and locked the passage via a PvP area which is why I decided to just not get it.

BUT ignoring the false equivalence fallacy, if the player is willing to spend money on the game in the first place, it shouldn't matter. Even more-so when the game is basically Ark Survival on Scorched Earth with a dune skin on it and a few additional mechanics added on. There was no decent reason that the game could not allow for a PvE only mode or at least the ability to self host your servers. They said they couldn't do either under the excuse that they wanted the game to be an MMO(which arguably they failed to deliver on as well)

As for New World? As a person who played it from beta(which I do regret because its not my style game, I just really wanted to like it), New Worlds downfall wasn't the dev's trying to cater to everyone, it was the lack of a story/ambition to want to play. It was the same gameplay loop over and over with no drive to want to continue the story. This combined with the failure to have a decent "end game" (story line wise) at launch killed it's userbase. They promoted a very heavily PvP based cooperative system and then massively fell through on the promises. This combined with the inconsistent servers and the boring game-play elements, made player retention extremely difficult. That's not appealing to masses, that's failing to deliver on promises and making a shit game.