AAA is a measure of budget, not necessarily quality.

Well, they spend their money stupidly and got a shitty game. In this case, blame the player, not the game.

When so many players die though, the game's clearly not a sustainable one. The AAA  business model is a fundamentally flawed one that stifles creativity and kills studios by requiring each game to make massive sales or sink its maker.

But did they really deserve to command a AAA budget in the first place ? 

Probably not. I haven't played many of their games, but Ryse was pretty horrible.

MSFT funded Ryse, so they would be the ones in financial trouble if it didn't sell well, which is sitting around 1 million sales. If 1 million is unsuccessful there is a lot of failures so far this gen. Wouldn't suprise me if this is nothing more than a rumor and full speculation, with a tiny bit of truth..

Loved the engine. The games became mediocre though. It's a shame. So well optimised for PC.

Many companies have already stated that they need 3 or even 5 million units to make a profit, this isn't really a big surprise. This is also one of the reasons Ubisoft recently stated that they won't be making many AAA games in the future.

That's too bad, the Crysis games were pretty fun, even if they lacked innovation.

Nope. They killed themselves with mediocre products and bad business partners as publishers. Not many devs survive by EA and MS when their games are selling less then 5 million +.

They deserve it. Crysis was a graphical marvel at the time and it had a fun, sandbox world. Later on they only released mediocre, shiny garbage.