I'm not convinced this game's development cycle wasn't all just a giant money laundering operation. There's no way they could spend that much time and that much money only to put out something so universally panned, and not be intentional. All those millions of dollars, and they never hired a single consultant that looked at the project and said "Literally nobody wants this"? I don't believe it.
I don't think anybody actually hated the game, it just was very mid, and for the space it was competing in it wasn't compelling. But it wasn't obviously bad
So if you're a consultant looking at one aspect of the game, it's hard to make the prediction the entire market would reject it.
It's really down to the game directors, and the leadership, and the executives. They didn't have a product that was sufficiently unique to make a name for itself, and they should have known that
You have to take in money for laundering to work. This is just money hemorrhaging. They fucked up royally, I think largely by not advertising. No one even heard of it until news of the poor release numbers made headlines, and that sure didnt entice purchases.
You say "handful", but it still hand thousands of players, and the thing that makes me sad about this screw up is that of those who played it, it was probably someone's favourite game…
…Is what I was going to say, until I looked at the Steam charts. It hit an all-time peak of 607 players, with estimates of total ownership ranging from 9.5k to 25.1k. It very well still may have been someone's favourite game and I feel really sad for them that it's gone, but wow the game still did so much worse than even my expectations based on the reporting.