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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"
Hell, they were already selling copies too. They were at 100% "completion" and still threw it out
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.