Might be, might be, but PHG obviously is another story in several aspects and not all of them seem to be bad - otherwise we all would not be so addicted, right?
I personally hated (and still do) the software development quality Illfonic showed some patches before - all these crashes - bah…
But I nevertheless am still playing (as are you, right?) as the beautiful and detailed jungle world and the depth of the game play is outstanding, if you ask me.
Illfonic is a relatively small company and the task they solved with PHG is unbelievable. How many multiplayer games do you know, which run cross-platform? I once searched for them, as I wanted to play with my “cross” friend - you will not find more than a handful out there yet! And the belonging development studios tend to be much bigger than Illfonic…
So, yes, the game and the development team have their weaknesses - but they also have their strengths. And said strengths may in particular lie in those things, where the game differs from all the “standard games”. But that is just an assumption of mine - as my experience in (these) games is quite limited…
So, this is just my personal feeling/opinion and I might be wrong :) In the end, the income to development costs ratio is the most important value for Illfonic, being a company, and none of us know this yet… Maybe even Illfonic yet does not know, how there business strategy will work out in the end.
But the fact, that the game runs on PS5 too, might hint into a direction, that PHG could still live in quite a whiiiile…