>>16102984
>>16104005
I don't have the pastebin, but I followed the drama and development closely. It failed for a couple reasons.
They first wanted to do a big e-sports thing. E-sports were all the rage back then, people were jumping on the bandwagon like they did with MOBAs and hero shooters. Firefall had PVP but it wasn't especially good, some classes were totally useless and it was just mediocre overall. They still tried to push it hard though, to the point where the PVE suffered.
Marketing was a clusterfuck. They built a bus to do tours with, had an entire datacenter and 20 computers inside. The plan was to drive to trade shows and expos and the like, host LAN parties, show off, etc. They dumped $2 million into it and it turned out to be unsafe to drive. And given that it wasn't a good competitive game anyway, it was even more useless. That's where Mark Kern really fucked up, because it was his brainchild.
There was a lot of general mismanagement. The game continued development and was decently fun, but they had trouble sticking to a single vision. Massive changes resulted in progression loss for players.
And then instead of doubling down, soaking the losses, and pushing the game to release, the publisher booted Kern and revamped the entire game in 3 weeks. It went from gear-based progression with open-world wandering and dynamic events to being level-based and quest drive, with the extensive crafting system being gutted and relegated to a secondary feature. The jetpack-based gameplay and shooting was still intact, but that was the last straw for me. The game was less fun on release than it ever was at any point in the beta.
Here are some additional links that cover it better than I could. I just played it and read about it, and was crushed when it was killed.
http://archive.is/sH2So
http://archive.fo/uiOXe
I've still got my Firefall posters in cardboard tubes somewhere. One from PAX, one from buying beta.