Originally Posted by
Rathothis
You're looking at long term profitability, but FC's problem at the time probably was short term cash flows. Think about it. When TSW was released, they expected significant revenues flows from box sales. It's likely that their financing was in part based on this - i.e., some of their loans will likely have had maturity days not long after release. And then they sold 200k copies instead of more than a million. That's exactly the type of situation where companies are forced to cut costs, even if these cuts also decrease revenue potential in the long term.
Not saying it really happened like this (kind of hard to tell based on their financial reporting), but I think it's a likely scenario.