A lot of people swung off the dicks of Bioshock and the first two thirds of the original were very good (last third was not needed) to the tune of two sequels. While I didn’t play either of the follow ups (Bioshock was not a good FPS) they were reportedly good games.
That took forever to make.
And cost more to make than they sold.
So there goes Irrational Games. Three solid games put out and a closed studio. How does that happen? Essentially it comes down to Poor project management.
I’ve been there, where a project is so fucked and my teams have been sent to die on a hill by the upper management and everyone busts ass to get the work done only to be fired a month later because the sales and management team sat around for a year on Facebook instead of bringing in new work from clients or making sure scope was reigned in so the budget wasn’t blasted to the Kuiper Belt. That looks like what happened here except in the game industry with a lot more budget dollars.