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Originally Posted by daikokunyo
so how did it all go down?
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Oh! I forgot to finish the story, didn't I. Thanks for the ping.
I mentioned that the development studio, Grigon, could sometimes be painfully out of touch. There was a span of MONTHS where development seemed to just be completely halted -- we knew there were promised features on the horizon, but we never got any updates, not even bugfix patches. From my semi-insider perspective I learned that Grigon (in South Korea) had been really slow to answer messages from the management (in the US). There were a couple of times where they flew a manager to Korea just to get communication moving.
At first, we thought it was a language and time zone barrier combined with known challenges on the technology side of things. This is actually information that you won't find on FusionFall's Wikipedia page, but FusionFall had originally been written using the Gamebryo engine. It switched over to Unity3D mainly to support being run in a web browser -- the management at Turner Entertainment wanted to avoid requiring young players to install and update a game client. (It turns out that installing and updating the Unity3D web player plugin might have been even more of a hassle for players than a game client would have been.) This was a fairly rushed migration, and a moderately challenging one: Gamebryo uses C++ while Unity uses C#, so basically all of the code had to be rewritten, and Unity was very new and wasn't fully mature yet, so they had to work around a lot of stuff. (FusionFall was directly or indirectly responsible for a LOT of development in the Unity engine.)
But no, it wasn't any of those things. Those were just excuses. As a matter of fact, Grigon had been on the brink of bankruptcy. I don't know the specific details, but I can imagine they were taking Cartoon Network's money and trying to use it to stay afloat but not having the funds to pay their engineers to work on the game. Turner management found out about this with barely enough time to demand that the assets and source code get handed over so they could develop the game in-house. Grigon closed its doors in early 2010, merely a year after the game's public launch.
It's not clear whether or not it was coincidence that the game went free-to-play in late 2009, but it was widely considered to be a bad sign. Cartoon Network did finally get things up and running on their side, but it was too little, too late. A lot of players had gotten bored of the lack of content updates, and the new content that was added afterward was not what players had expected and the release pace was inconsistent (sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow), and it didn't really tie in with the rest of the game.
The game kept limping along until the servers were shut down in 2013, but with no real monetization strategy and no marketing whatsoever it really didn't have a future. I think they were planning on merchandise, but that never happened.