Could be.

A plan like that would be pretty risky. I suspect they just didn’t think it through much. I think their sales are mostly driven by people who didn’t care about anything besides a AAA Monkey King game.

Most people in the US have no idea how much pent up demand there was for this game. Monkey King is an insanely popular character. Imagine if Star Wars was a 500 year old franchise and nobody had ever made a decent video game about it. All your life you grow up with weird foreign characters you’ve never heard of and then someone comes along and says, “We’re going to make it and we’re pulling out all the stops on the graphics.”

If the developers did anything short of kicking puppies in public, people would still line up to throw money at them.

No idea.

It’s hard to tell what their sales would have been had they left those terms out.

Most studios can only dream of having their marketing backfire that successfully.

https://steamdb.info/app/2358720/charts/

Yeah. It clearly killed their sales.

I’m sure the Game Science folks are re-evaluating their life choices and wondering where they went wrong.