Back in those days i.e. the A3-A5 days (maybe even the inital A6 times) the Acknex engine was just top notch. At the same time I think the clinching to the concepts of this era is what became the first step to "3DGS' doom". Back in the mid-90s there simply existed no great tools and the internet wasn't all that available. Engines had to come with their own editors and I think with MED and WED 3DGS made a great job offering good editors. The developers unfortunately never really stepped away from this concept of delivering this all in one development suite. Together with some (in my opinion) narrow-minded decisions this made 3DGS fall behind as for example other engines opted for creating tools which let you place and organize your objects you created in your tool of choice whereas 3DGS still tried to force the at that time already outdated WED on the users. At a certain point external tools became a standard for doing stuff but 3DGS insisted on staying the all in one solution for everything. Later on I had the impression they tried to catch up by offering all sorts of import options of formats like fbx so you at least could import parts of your external work while still having to e.g. work out your animations in MED (at least I often read of a lackluster animation import). Finally the engine began to fall behind and the tools began to fall behind not mentioning utter fails like that WYSIWYG editor by HeelX TripleX (EDIT: I stand corrected here as it wasn't HeelX ) which was supposed to finally let you place your objects while running the engine instead of going through the tedious WED build process in order to just see everything at runtime which afaik got to a halt when its code was meant to be ported to Lite-C but resulted in a terrible performance (I think TripleX gave up at that point)...

So while the article ratchet mentioned ultimately is about the PS4 it in parts really is applicable to 3DGS. It didn't adapt to the Zeitgeist and stayed true to that concept of a complete development suite with tools for just everything. When external tools began to do the jobs and became to advanced that they were great at their job there should have been a turn of tides. Unfortunately they sticked to the decision of not only providing next to everything themselves but also do everything themselves. Use e.g. Raknet to replace the lackluster multiplayer features? No! And so went precious development time into improving the really sub-par multiplayer features 3DGS had and the result still wasn't all that convincing. These are things I to this day don't completely understand: Providing everything and also coding it themselves. A new scripting language? Picking some of which already exist? No - let's create Lite-C instead. Making lightmaps available to the developer so tools like e.g. Gile[s] can create them (fast, with lots of features like including alpha transparency of textures into that calculation at e.g. fences and creating lightmaps of high quality)? No - lightmaps are a WED only thing which then got "boosted" with tiny features here and there like e.g. the rather underwhelming integration of radiosity (which was sort of nice but the lightmaps in general still didn't look all that good for various reasons)...

Well I don't want to start too much nagging now but I really could start a rather long list with features that in my opinion turned out to be a waste of time in most regards and which itself weren't all that convincing...

Well with the new WED in development maybe 3DGS now aims at the right direction but I guess it already has "jumped the shark". In my opinion it should have opted for a way more of e.g. the FPS Creator. A nice and easy to use editor, premade scripts for simple pathfinding and so on which are easy to use and adapt and way better templates with a good editor integration (I always appreciated the game templates one to this day can find in the forecast but I rarely found those really useful and that's why I think the realization of often used features like an A* pathfinder with a nice and flexible editor intergration would have been magnitudes of more helpful). This new orientation with like a 100$ Com and 200$ Pro pricing would have been where I could see 3DGS shine. What I unfortunately see is stuff like Android support being taken into consideration which to me sounds like a bad idea because this sector already is dominated by various superior products allowing you a fast and efficient development of those usually "little" / casual games...