Speed running capitalism with the ecosystem of this game, eh? The creators must profit, the early investors must profit, line goes up!!!! Just drain new players before they get established, or have a monster capital dump into company-focused expenditures and take over the ecosystem.

It's predictable when the only goal is to make profit. Once that primary motivation is changed, the game will recover and be awesome again. But that's not really something that is expected or even considered by this team.