Originally Posted by
Osmeric
That commitment doesn't really matter. If management decisions are being made based on bad metrics, that's a fatal condition for a company. The earnestness of the flight crew doesn't matter if they fly the plane right into the ground.
This style of failure is so common it has a name (Goodhart's Law) and is taught in B-schools, but it still happens. The error is confusing correlation with causation, and reversing the sense of causation. A good game causes engagement, and also retention, but increasing engagement doesn't automatically cause the game to be good (reversed causation), and to therefore cause retention.
From the outside, the poor reception of SL sure looks like a textbook example of screwing up due to targeting of bad metrics.