Neither did Hello games when they continued to work on NMS, it didn’t have any monetization beyond buying the game, but they still did it in the end and it paid off.
It was originally advertised as f2p, at some point they changed their minds and decided to charge for it, clearly it didn’t go well since people already associated it with free.
This is the truth people don’t want to admit, but Final Fantasy XIV being successful carried square enix through their darkest days when everything wasn’t making a profit. Cygames using all the money they got from the granblue gacha to finance an action rpg and a fighting game, etc.
They serve as a safety net, we lost mimimi last year, I don’t think anyone would say they made bad games, but they just didn’t sell enough so they closed.
Genshin-likes are being very popular in the east, this year we got Wuthering Waves (which is actually much better), and 2-3 years ago we got Tower of Fantasy (which was terrible), now the same studio from ToF announced Neverness to Everness which is the same concept of an open world anime action rpg but in an urban setting, suspiciously years after Project Mugen had been announced which is has the exact same premise.
Doesn’t change the fact that the few fans it had can’t play it ever again, game is still killed because it had no support for community servers, just matchmaking.
I for sure would prefer to host my own The Crew and not getting a refund.
Anthem kept the servers going longer, it got some updates and EA even promised an entire rework akin to No Man’s Sky, but EA being EA they never delivered it and just cancelled everything lol.
No? Welcome to gachas, don’t even pretend girls don’t want to be put on the wall by their daddies, there are plenty of thirsty traps with the dudes on TikTok.
These are games made to sell you waifus and husbandus, they are appealing by design. I recommend you to watch the newest Jane Doe trailer on the Zenless channel, this is the target demographic.
NMS was lacking portals and the sandworm, both things that it has now.
Cyberpunk actually changed a lot: they tweaked the handling of cars and bikes several times, put in a dating system where you can invite romanceable NPCs to your apartment, they removed armor from clothing and remade all skill trees to be more active, put in shooting inside a car, actually made the police pursuit instead of just spawning on foot cops near you, now even Max-Tac drops from a flying vehicle at max wanted, and finally in the last update: the metro system.
I lighten up on small teams, I gave Anno mutationem a pass because it’s an indie game by a small team when they kept patching it all the time for 3 months, game was cheap too.
I won’t lighten up on 70 dollars trainwrecks with no ambition.