Not *A * multiplayer game. A multiplayer STAR WARS game. And not just any multiplayer Star Wars game - no, the single best received Star Wars game of its kind in the last two decades, coupled with its prequel… And they estimated around 200 people to play it at launch.
Harder than delivering shit and cashing in just as much. The grab&run simply is more profitable than actually putting in the work - especially since there seem to be no palpable negative consequences.
Corporations want gamers to want mass subscriptions because they want to rent out their games forever instead of getting only a single payment for their product. And then they find flimsy excuses to push subscriptions for products that do not warrant subscriptions but are mutilated to squeeze some way of adding subscriptions into them. And then the corporations let games without subscriptions fail while pretending that subscription-based services are delivered because there’s demand and not because they don’t want to deliver finished products that don’t generate easy endless trickling revenue streams.