Our peek was Feb 2009. The start of the decline was completely due to the economy.
HiTech
I think the armchair CEO's of this conversation are dinging Hitech for not hopping on a band wagon and changing his game into the other games becasue all the kool kids were doing it to get the rubes into the tent. Not having skin in Hitech's business, and won't suffer any consequences, they want Hitech to fail to justify their inflexible feelings about how he cheated them out of their good thing. They want to textually pound Hitech into failure in his forum one customer at a time or, dance on his company's grave becasue they "feel" he cheated them out of their game fix while they ran away from the game over unspecified hurt feelings. The economy probably had something to do with it but, why let that get in the way of a good character assassination.
You can see the evidence of this by how hard they work to undercut his company in everyone's eyes with their personal recriminations. They don't want to accept the world economy tanked and people didn't have an extra $14.95 to spend for entertainment. It's been almost 10 years and the economy is recovering while during that decade companies saw "freemium" content as a way to continue making money in a down world economy. Flash, glitz and instant piu, piu, piu ruled this last decade which is not Aces High. And many of them keep inferring that Hitech could do even better flash and glitz if he would just listen to them and stop being so inflexible. Eventually it all comes down to their last argument of trying to paint him as out of touch and loosing his bearings becasue he has been around too long and has now become unfit to know anything about online games.
After all, they are game industry experts and are here to unload both barrels of pure truth as they see it or some nonsense like that. Heck, AkAk has worked in the gaming industry for 20 years and they even tell him to pound sand. Some really tough gaming CEO's they is......