They’ll fire the developers that implemented the unpopular features (that they didn’t want to build in the first place but were forced upon them from executives, who, by the way, are due for their end of year bonuses!!)
The refunds may have hurt, but what hurt more was the fact that in the last week HD2 went from #1/2 on the Steam global top sellers to #11. The big red “Overwhelmingly Negative” next to a title is a huge turnoff to new buyers.
Some executive somewhere has a chart showing daily sales numbers and watched them fall off a cliff in the last week.
Honestly felt this way about BioShock Infinite - the gameplay was alright, but it was the story that made it good, but you only get to explore it for the first time once. I have zero plans to ever pick that one up again
I get what you’re saying and I’m sure all the MBAs at Microsoft are shitting bricks, but I never fully understand why a company would be disappointed with a service like this one even doing only slightly better than breaking even.
Not everything needs to have infinite growth and gigantic margins as long as $-in > $-out.