if sales numbers went off the charts, and 5 million players were looking to get online, do you think henrik would sit there any say 'no, one world only, and our server hosts ~10k players concurrently, so the rest of you will have to just wait'. they'd be instantly pissing away more money than they know what to do with.
Yes, but not for maybe the reasons you think. I'm not saying Henrik doesn't want millions of dollars or MO2 to be a success. But even if 5 million people were saying, "Hey, I want to play your game, let me give you money", I think he and the rest of us understand that the 30 person team he's currently running and the structure of the game right now just could not sustain that influx and survive. Anything he would do to accommodate the 5 million people on day 1, for example sell a portion of the proceeds to a publisher to get them to duplicate the game on 1000 server shards and handle all incoming support, and hire 300 developers on day 1 would completely destroy what is drawing people to this game in the first place and honestly I don't think the team/development structure could scale, they'd basically just be selling off the code and idea to someone else who would absolutely not want to make this game. Whenever you have a very innovative concept, it's much safer to start small with enthusiasts and iterate, iterate, iterate until it's ready for a mass market.