I had to look it up. It was called Guardian of Atlas and Sean left the company right after the beta launched and then the game got cancelled. My guess as to why it went poorly is just that it was inexperienced devs making a game at a time when SC2 was still actually relatively popular. There was no space in the already tiny genre of RTS.

Now that Blizzard has essentially abandoned StarCraft, it might be possible for some folks to carve some of that tiny market away.

Day9 did consult on the design of an RTS like ten years ago and it didn’t amount to anything.

That’s not what capitalism means, dawg.