There are many such cases of course, but I wouldn't say it's a huge thing. Like it has been mentioned many times, the biggest reason PoE2 failed is because PoE1 base game was bad and boring, so nobody came back for White March or Deadfire. Like you said, they should've looked at the sold copies for White March and set their expectations accordingly.
Depression is a cruel mistress. I bet at this point he's just indulging the voices in the back of his head going all "No one likes your game, you suck at designing them, you should've become a doctor like your poor mother wanted". And alternating drowning them in hard liquor.
Because it just is. As said above, I can't imagine that spending time talking about what a lousy designer he is would be good for his mental health.
Then why waste time talking about it with random people who don't have any more insight about this than the next guy?
memes aside, he's an experienced designer and probably past the "oh god someone in the internet said my game is shit where is the whisky" phase. Comments saying the comercially unsuccessful game was wonderful and they loved it must be heartwarming but it can't give him many ideas.
Again, trying to make rocket science out of something relatively simple. In POEs case it's both. It was the first of its kind, gained a lot of (social) media attention and, as such, was bought by many random people. At best, these people run it to learn that they weren't in fact hardcore role players that loved IE games to bits when they were 4 years old. So they left it a "this is some old school rocket propelled grenade shit yo, absolutely loved it" review and went back to your proverbial Fallout 3. But, obviously, it was also bought by people longing for a proper iso crpg who then found out that they didn't love IE because of walls of dry text, boring char dev and killing trash for no rewards.
I see you've already been adopted to Larian inner circle.
