It still amazes me how they managed to fail with Tribes Ascend so hard.
They had pretty much everything, a game that appealed to people who loved movement and aiming but was still fairly simple enough as to not turn off a lot of the casual crowd. They had Total Biscuit and no doubt countless other youtubers shilling for them, they had reddit shilling for them, they had RPS and PC gamer shilling for them, they weren't lacking in terms of playerbase and all they needed to do was build upon the good start they had.
With Global Agenda, I get it. It wasn't that big of a deal and they had to resort to PvE and F2P as their last ditch resort for a dying and uninterested playerbase which ultimately killed the game since it went against the whole point of the game.