Not sure where the official announcement of this happened, but videos and discussions of the game are now finally allowed. The game is still invite-only, but expect to start seeing it all over the place now. Popular streamers are already jumping into it.
Agreed. Why would they force you to pay 40 in a genre already overpopulated and most of them are free.
It’s basically impossible to increase the price tag on a game like that, and if you go free, the design pivots to a lot of abusive monetization systems. People run into that at the 10th hour of any free game.
It might be failing for a lot of reasons - I don’t think that one is necessarily their mistake though.