If you look at the older titles, there’s so much love and passion that went into the artworks. 1404 is 16 years old and has aged incredibly well, because of the high quality of the work that went into it. This is missing in 117.

They tried to build a lot of hype around the game and get people to preorder. Maybe those numbers were (far) below expectations?

The most recent release is probably Anno 117 which came out yesterday. While decently looking it’s lacking features of the previous title (like coop mode and mod browser) with the promise they will be added later and is priced at around 60€ or 90€ if you want to gamble on the quality of the promised to be released DLC. They also relied on AI generated images in some of the assets used in the game instead of paying their artists. Optimisation for the game seems to be ok, but not great but it might be too early to judge that fully yet.