At the time, I think Rob and Aaron didn't like what we were doing with Cataclysm visually. It was pretty different than their game and the unit designs were certainly not as good or in the same style of Homeworld. Even the UI was more painterly, contrasting harshly with their established look. Thier game was bluish, ours was rust coloured. I personally think they were in the right to be critical of the look of Cataclysm, I was at the time as well, just not vocally. I think they later came around to how the game played, being designed more like Starcraft as opposed to Total Annihilation. The two games contrasted so drastically that I think they just felt more comfortable following Homeworld up with more Homeworld. Honestly, I think Cataclysm was a far superior multiplayer game but the single player has issues I don't really like. I wish I could remember basically what the budget was. I never saw a hard and fast number. I think I remember hearing that 300k was break even for the game. I never once saw or heard of a sales estimate after release. Homeworld 1 had serious development problems. It was a full year late. In fact it was released when Cataclysm was originally supposed to be released, and as a result we were going to pause Cataclysm development and make an actual Homeworld expansion. We started its pre pro dev but the idea got canned about a month later. And yeah, we