A net negative $400 million? Yes?
I don't understand why they abandoned it so quickly instead of at least trying a f2p model. Shut down servers for a week and announce a relaunch?
Corpos love to parrot sunk cost fallacy. As a developer myself I have seen very promising projects thrown away at 95% completion because some finance guy realized how much they had spent on it. No amount of "we're only weeks away from launch" or "look at the potential here" will work with these people. It's maddening how detached from reality they are, they get it in their head that another penny will mean that they're just burning money, when all I see is how much was already spent.
So yeah, with 400mil put in already? You don't even want to see if any of it is salvageable? The maps? The worlds? F2P? Selling it to an indie dev to retool? Nope, to corpo you might as well throw it in the garbage, anything else is "Sunk cost"
We don't know that it's "abandoned" just yet. It has in essence been recalled. They may very well try pivoting it to a free to play model, but something like that can take longer than a week.
They could not have paid enough people to download the game and play it, let alone get people to do it for free.
I still think the games biggest failure was it being paid (and not cheap) while there is plenty of F2P competitors that aren't any worse. Why on Earth would anyone pay for mediocre online shooter just to try it out when you can instantly play dozen similar ones for free?
It was free in an open beta, and hardly anyone took the opportunity to play it then. Chances are they burn through more money than they make by making it free to play. I'd happily pay $40 if that same game had split-screen, private servers, and LAN deathmatch, but no one makes that kind of game anymore.
Idk, my point still stands. Ofc I could try it during open beta (if I knew), but then it still cost $40 which is ridiculous, because all the microtransactions were still there (if I'm not mistaken) so it felt like f2p, played like it, but stil cost 40 bucks. Lol, nope.
The business model for games like this is entirely geared towards whales which is why almost everyone in online comments seem to hate them but studios keep making them. I really don't understand why all of them aren't F2P given that model though.
There is still Star Citizen...
That one is raking in cash like crazy though (not that I consider what they are doing ethical)
Yeah...the supporters take the role of Sony here...
