Sony failing to get another live service game off the ground really highlights a few things.
How hard it is to launch something in this space. Not only has the market moved away, it was also saturated long before they dropped Condord.
Companies (still) fail to understand that a bad launch isn't exactly death. There are several ways they could of tried to salvage this instead of just Zaslav'ing it for a tax write off 2 weeks in. We've seen plenty of examples in the past 10 years of games that were able to turn themselves around and find success. No reason a company like Sony couldn't align resources to make it happen here.
This should of been on PS+ Day One... I get not putting your shorttail, singleplayer, prestige titles up there at launch. I also get not wanting to go completely F2P, a microtransaction enabled MP game though? Why the hell wouldn't you want the biggest audience possible out the gate? Halo Infinite was a shit show at launch but it was free and has maintained a pretty damn solid user base for years because of it. Hell, I've even picked up a few season passes and cosmetics despite never playing a Halo MP game in the past (outside of lan'ing up for Halo 1 waaaaay back).
Lots more thoughts, but the schadenfreude is just too much right now to avoid jumping on a still warm corpse.
To point 2, I like to mention that Overwatch started off as a scraped game. MMO if I remember right. Oversaturated market, so they took the assets and jumped into hero shooters when the concept was fresh.
Obviously contemporary Blizzard still found a way to ruin it, but to be fair the genre more or less than it's course by then. Anyway, if Sony had an ounce of talent that old Blizzard had, they'd have done likewise.
Something along those lines, although someone with better memory might recall. I think they even had the setting sort of figured out, which kind of shows in the early lore of that game.
As a technicality you would be correct. Games can be removed from PS+ though and it also lauched day and date on Steam. So calling it F2P instead of a PS+ Day One would be a little harder for fans to swallow on PC where it would still have been $40. See also the aforementioned Halo Infinite which launched on Xbox first then PC but only the multiplayer component is F2P on both. You can play SP with Game Pass Ultimate but you need to purchase a license to do so on Steam.