If this is true... Oof...
Like, imagine losing your job because somebody decided to drop over 70 milion in something like this... I bet everybody affected would have predicted that this needed to be canned way earlier. Yet the people responsible for this unforced error will be largely unaffected because since business is accepted to be a gamble at times, I guess that means you get to make stupid mistakes that ruin hundreds of livelihoods for no reason and just go oops, my bad, we'll have to do a tactical restructuring I guess.
Seriously, the first trailer was unanimously received with "another one of these games?" reactions. There is no excuse for any dollar spent after that! Anybody could have told you it was a miss! Aaaarrrgh.
Also much less important but still frustrating, knowing that so many properties under SEGA have struggled to get a budget and support, while they were spending all of the money in a fire pit instead. Now that it's been cancelled, we can say ANYTHING would have been a better use of that money. Don't ever let SEGA tell you that anything would be a bad project ever again! Oh, SEGA, you still think a localized port to modern platforms of Valkyria Chronicles 3 would be a bad project? Well let me tell you, it sure as hell wouldn't have lost DOZENS OF MILLIONS.
And in that line, nothing hurts more for me personally than knowing all of the issues that the Total War franchise has had, with products that didn't get the development time they needed, additional content policies that went way overboard with pricing, very small degree of evolution and investment between entries... And the money that could have gone to that consistently performing franchise that has no true substitute competitors was instead going to... To burn it in a pit with funny colors and masks and dances and...