Fun question to older folks... Who thought this would not happen?
I'm 70, been playing since Memorial Day, 2015, a few months after the official release. I wasn't surprised when support for MAC was dropped because MAC's have their own way of doing things that's not compatible with the way things needed to get done when Horizons was released. Still worked for Consoles, so I blame MAC's directly for that issue. And they got it to work with Xbox and PS, so there were no issues. When "Beyond" was released, it was still possible to port it to Consoles. No one saw a problem then, either.
When FD finished with the fourth week of alpha testing on Odyssey, lots of people were quite happy with it, frame rates were brought up and things were just fine. We all expected that the rest of us would be happy with Odyssey. What was released was (apparently) the pre-alpha version that no one tested and THAT was TOTALLY unexpected by the entire player base. 10 (soon to be 11) updates later and FD still couldn't get this to work.
Things might have turned out differently if the "approved" version of the alpha test (the only everyone liked after four weeks of testing) had been released instead. Those that participated in the alpha tests noticed the difference immediately. I honestly thought FD had released the wrong version.
I don't work at FD so I can't honestly say what happened there. I doubt this was deliberate; no one wants to look like a failure - it's not something you want on a resume, either (failed to correctly port a major game to consoles as the owner promised, owner gave up after 11 tries).
So, no, no one expected this. Not right away, anyway. After update 5 (I believe) is when the DOOM music started playing softly in the background, barely noticable at first, and then started slowly increasing in volume, until today.
Yes.
PC will be shut down at some point and as the only ones left, it will be us next.
In game as in life - just enjoy what you have right now as you don't know when it will end.
To quote Echo and the bunnymen - 'nothing ever lasts forever'.
You remember what David Braben promised? During the KickStarter? Does this look anything like that? NO.
As we have all come to learn in life, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.
Sometimes, life tosses a monkey wrench in the oddest of places.
Life goes by the name of Murphy and he has laws about that sort of thing.
I'm certain Mr. Braben is not happy about watching a dream fall down face first in the mud.
I know I wouldn't be happy with it.
Now that FD can concentrate on PC version, let's cross fingers, wave a dead chicken over the server, leave a burnt offering to the RNG gods and hope things get better.