Broadly, we’d need to feel that it was a “good” investment, and that there was a strong chance it would ultimately recoup the overall investment we made.
Every game has a budget; the ads you see for other games come out of that individual game’s budget - and if a game does better than expected, more budget might be made available to support that. Incidentally, we haven’t paid for any advertising for PowerWash Simulator - that one has had a massive amount of visibility purely from people wanting to play it/stream it, etc.
I, too, was hooked by Boundless - and the sense that anything was possible. In fact, the depth of passion from the community was one of the factors in us deciding to invest in the first place. But, if I’m really honest (with myself, also) I’ve come to the conclusion that as it’s designed Boundless is a game that’s only ever going to appeal to a relative niche in comparison to other world-builders that have been mega-successful… but to those it does appeal to, it’s almost like a second life (no pun intended).
Now, if that “engagement” from the super-dedicated community of the game could be brought to the masses… well, that was the thinking. Not only would it be self-sustaining (bear in mind server costs increase with player numbers), it would be solidly profitable - and that could fund ongoing development for many years, not to mention additional platforms, etc etc.
But when 1.0 released, that engagement wasn’t there on the broader scale. In hindsight, the pricing was probably wrong - I’ll hold my hands up on that one. Maybe if it had been $20 we’d have reached a critical mass? But the reasoning was, this is a subscriptionless MMO - no monthly fee… but there are ongoing and not insignificant costs of running (and beyond that, developing) the game. So it felt reasonable, and justified. Pull the price down to $20 and with bigger player numbers, maybe it would even have been sustainable either? All we can do is look at what happens when the game is on sale at 50% off (ie $20) - and the answer there is… not a great deal.
So maybe it’s a complexity vs depth argument, where potential players are put off either by not knowing the extent of what’s possible in the game, feeling like ‘late-comers’ can’t compete on a level playing field with those from Early Access, not understanding game mechanics, the sheer number of recipes (most of which aren’t ever used) etc?
Maybe people didn’t like the visual style? Sometimes Boundless can be beautiful, but maybe we just didn’t pay enough attention to curating colour schemes that would be more conventionally appealing at the start? There was a desire to have biomes and resources mix in gradually more exotic ways as planet levels went higher - but maybe we should have paid more attention to the aesthetics?
Should there have been a system to ‘save’ expired beacons? Or how would that have worked with long-dormant settlements and a finite galaxy? Should there have been no rules about borders of sovereignty, should griefing have been possible, should PvP have been auto-on for higher level worlds? And so on, and so on.
If I’m honest I don’t know (if I had the power to make the decisions) what I’d have changed in hindsight. Probably a bit of everything from the above. But because Boundless is such a broad experience - the name itself gives that away - it’s hard to say for sure if there was even one thing that would have moved the needle and changed it all; or would have needed lots of things to have been different?
(I mean, in the nicest possible way, even the core community often doesn’t agree on what needs to be changed to find the silver bullet 
)
And that, in turn, then begs the question - even if we had fully-funded dev team for 6 months starting right now, would we even know/be able to make the changes that suddenly move that amazing engagement from the super-core to have a wider appeal?
That’s the situation we’d have to be in before SE would look at it and say - okay, let’s pour more money in, because this time we’re confident it will be different. We’re very far from that, sadly, so it’s pretty irrelevant whether we’d put money into search, social, influencers (you can’t buy ads on Steam, that’s purely driven by the algorithm or Valve choosing to support).
The conversation for right now is, can we even find a cost-covering position in the near future? Is there any chance of even small updates? I didn’t intend to come out and ask the community for the answers to those questions - let alone the broader questions above - but obviously it’s a conversation that you’ve been having in effect for some time anyway. So I’m trying to be transparent about what I can be.
