Post cases of game companies having lightning in a bottle and still fucking up somehow, lol.
I'll start:
Some Kiwi creates a zombie mod for the military simulator he trained on when serving as chairforce so he can have some LAN party fun, buddies complain that theres nothing to do so he adds looting mechanics, game hits the early 2010s internet like some crack cocaine epidemic, perfect storm of zombie hype with the Walking Dead, I Am Legend, Dead Rising and the zenith of e-celebs doing Let's Play content on Youtube. 2.5 million players in under a year, Bohemia Interactive makes so much money its unreal. Arma 2, an eurojank 2009 military simulator gets modding attention unseen since the release of Oblivion, maps, gamemodes, even the first game iteration of a Battle Royale genre get created. Mod basically kickstarts the Battle Royale, Looter Shooter, Crafting Survival & Extraction Shooter genres.
One and a half year later, it is 2013, the Standalone DayZ is announced and released in December. Its a terrible mess, doesn't have a tenth of the content the mod had and runs like dogshit, with a $30 price tag I might add.
13 years have passed since 2012. Bohemia Interactive had the opportunity to create games like Escape From Tarkov, H1Z1, PUBG, Fortnite and all those crafting survival games, all of which made a combined of multiple hundreds of million. Its not like they didn't try, they released some shitty Free-To-Play Battle Royale in 2019 that only has 90 players right now, way way too late. Instead they are stuck with a dying game hitting only 50k daily players on a good day. Gone are the 2.5 million players of old.
I like dayz but it's insane that it's been out for over a fucking decade and basic shit like vehicles crash the fucking servers.