I think almost all “big name” AAA games that announce a new game will be over-hyped, and over-hype makes people disappointed. The higher they fly, the harder they fall; look at everything Blizzard, Bethesda, CDPR, and all the big names have released in the last few years - people expecting something better than their favourite game will always be disappointed!
FYI half of the game’s content is probably locked behind social interaction. Maybe that’s a bad way of phrasing it, it’s more like there are lots of different areas of the game (farming, exploring, dungeoneering, and socialising) and they all unlock more bits in the other areas. Either way you probably had a bad time as you were only getting a small slice of the game (though obviously that’s fine if you weren’t going to enjoy it anyway!)
The root cause of so many of these layoffs is overspending. It’s also often, ironically, overspending linked to success. Gaming boomed during the pandemic when most of us were locked up at home with nothing to do, so companies saw currency signs in their eyes and jumped in on it.
Literally discussed in the article. The people’s revolution is not upon us, comrade!
I’ve seen this posted before, but how does that make their stats look good? Oh you’ve got X million users! And how much money did you make? Oh. So how many of your users have ever paid you any money? Oh.
I assume their logic is to give you free games so you get into the habit of looking at their storefront and going to their launcher to play your games in the hope that you’ll start buying your games from there instead. I can’t see how claiming the freebies but never giving them money helps them.