Some of these types of things happen at other gaming companies as well. I worked at a leading multiplayer online gaming company that has some of the most played

Some of these types of things happen at other gaming companies as well. I worked at a leading multiplayer online gaming company that has some of the most played games in the world. There was a person that pushed for a feature in a game citing "decline in player base" that needed to be remediated ASAP. The data was being shown with reports that this was the case and these reports were escalated to the CEO and leadership for the game. The feature was in development for over a year, released, and had incredibly negative player reception. So much that we started to see an ACTUAL decline in player engagement due to the nature of the change. Retrospectively, re-analyzing the reports we found that there was a critical transformation happening that caused for most of our players and our most engaged players to be removed from the number of total players. This was an incredibly small bug that was caused by not accounting for a previous feature release in the game. Essentially a data engineering/PM bug and pushing of a perspective caused for a lack of double checking the data and caused for the company to make an incredibly bad bet on a new feature that actually removed player engagement. This is why it is helpful to use data, but validate, and listen to players at every step of the way. Player happiness will drive engagement, manufacturing engagement is much harder.