I heard about this late last year, long, long after the death knell had sounded and the game was already on life support. I gave it a try for curiosity's sake and found a game breaking bug early on that entirely halted any and all progress. It was a known issue but since there were no devs working at the studio there was no one to fix it. According to the community, they had like one dude who sometimes checked support tickets but was basically a GM, not a dev.
Reading about its trouble development, it seems that so many bad decisions were made and never any good ones. Mark Kern must take a lot of the blame as the person in charge, whether or not his Chinese overlords may (and probably did) have a hand in it. Apparently they entirely removed whole parts of the game, reworked some completely only to remove them again, removed a whole class of suit/weapon, PvP got taken out completely. Instead of iterating and improving on what came before, it was a directionless meander with the wheel being reinvented at every turn.
And after this fiasco, Mark Kern has the actual gall to ask for fans' money [https://em8er.com/] to develop his new idea, which according to him is what Firefall could've/should've/would've been. I read an article about an indie dev crew that did something similar with a Steam early access game (Towns [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-05-09-the-fall-of-towns] was the name). Took all the money, failed to deliver then had the cohones to ask for more money to develop something entirely new. These are crooked people who should be chased out of the industry with pitchforks and dogs snapping at their heels.
I am worried Star Citizen will fall into this same category before it's even out. Constant changes, reinventions, developer controversies and troubles, the real money shenanigans which are frankly crooked as f**k (selling ?1,000+ virtual goods for a game that is still in fuc***g alpha!) and the scope changes, feature creep and so on.