I remember when this launched, I watched some streams of it and found it fun to watch(which was a goal of the project) but had little interest in playing it, since the game had a lack of internal coherence to it; from experience I know that this is the thing that games need above all else, or else potential players will look at it and say "I don't know what this is about". And what it's "about" isn't as simple as telling the player what to do, presenting an appealing theme or carefully tuning all the numbers, but in making the game's features match up with and extend the core play concept.

This game just had a mashup of popular tropes: the team "hero shooter", the battle royale, sci-fi alien creatures. Mechanically speaking, nothing was wrong with it and there was plenty of depth and detail on display, but that's not a game that people can get excited about even if it had kept pace with the trends; a new entry has to define itself distinctively against its priors, in the way that, for example, Overwatch elaborated on Team Fortress 2.

A contrasting story is with a game I still play, Planetside 2. This game launched over seven years ago and changed ownership and management a few times, and it's persisted with a loyal playerbase even though it's never found a mass audience. The quality that has allowed PS2 to survive very rough periods is that it does something that other game companies can't manage to pull off: a very large, persistent MMO world that also has fast first-person shooter gameplay. Despite having trouble achieving that goal in many respects, people stuck to the game because it was the best example of it being pulled off. Amazon actually hired some of the PS2 launch devs and they still haven't succeeded in bringing out a similar game.

When the battle royale trend came about, Daybreak, the owners of Planetside, decided they would, instead of building on the strengths of the existing game, make a spinoff product, Planetside: Arena. Like Crucible, it was fun to watch - it scaled up the battle royale experience quite a bit and had some good ideas for streamlining it and making it very intense and fast-paced - but it also launched late and nobody played it, particularly not the existing players of Planetside 2, who felt that the concept went against the core "Planetside" experience. The game never hit the critical mass of population necessary to have acceptable matchmaking.

Afterwards, Daybreak reorganized their management so that each of the games had their own studio with less centralized control. And in this respect things have gotten interesting, because PS2 has gotten continuing reinvestment as a result, and the game is changing through successive major patches into something that is - while often stepping on the toes of the veterans - overall more coherent and more successful in capturing that broad appeal, by gradually restructuring the game to highlight the parts that work(the chaos of a perpetual combined-arms PVP battle) while easing the complex parts that new players struggle with(finding the fight has been made easier over time, early character goals are now defined through daily quests and scripted campaigns, a traditional MMO hub zone has been added to supplement feature discovery, and various quality of life features have been introduced).

And the response has been mostly good in terms of the numbers. The launch of these new updates always gets a lot of returning players, and raises awareness for new ones. The game is still developing with respect to its core idea, which is impressive for so many years put into it. But as both Crucible and Planetside Arena demonstrated, you have to have a very strong sense of that idea, and no amount of production effort substitutes to close that gap.