Red_Avatar: Another example is Epic with the big idiot at the helm: Cliff Bleszinski ... I personally decided to never buy another Epic game because of him. His arrogance and ignorance offended me plenty. Unreal III was basically a rehash of the previous Unreal Tournament games with little original content. There were quite a lot of issues at first too - for starters, a lot of people were unable to see more than just a handful of servers. Yet Epic blamed the poor sales on piracy and only piracy. Oh no, it wasn't the umpteenth cheap rehash of Unreal Tournament, it has to be piracy.
UT3 didn't fail because it was a *gasp* Unreal Tournament game. It would have failed harder if it HADN'T been an Unreal Tournament game. It failed because at launch it had multiple major problems due to the fact that Midway insisted on a too early release. It was an obvious console port, which offended a large part of their core PC audience. It had massive problems with the server browser, as you mentioned. It had several highly annoying graphical issues. And probably the number one thing that killed it was the fact that there was no Linux server on release. Since all the people who hosted UT2004 servers, and were therefore the people expected to host UT3 servers as well, ran Linux servers, the multiplayer audience was simply lost from the beginning.
All these things have been fixed by now, and today UT3 is actually a brilliant game, quite worthy of the series, but it came too late and the damage is done. At any given time, there are still more people online playing UT99 and UT2004 (each of them, not the two combined) than there are people playing UT3. In fact, as of this writing, these are the numbers of online players for each game (via gametracker.com):
UT3: 288
UT2004: 614
UT99: 832