Notice that some companies hang on to game features, even though they are unpopular?
It's not just here. World Of Warships is introducing submarines, into a fundamentally surface-action based naval game. The subs are truly overpowered, even by the most generous evaluations (like sonar that can see through islands).
They have spent the money, rolled the feature out the door, and they will be (redacted) before they admit that they made a mistake to their stakeholders. It would hurt them in their game- money.
Basically every game that releases broken, unfinished or simply objectively bad in any regard is a representation of companies suffering the "sunk cost fallacy".
As a small business owner, I have to be a little different, because I rely on a word of mouth and good outlook, so when I make a mistake (for example I buy a product that isn't of a representable quality) I have to bite the bullet and write it off, because I know that if I sold it to a customer, they may never return.
Big companies, and game publishers in particular, don't have this "problem" and will always release the product to make at least PART if the sunk investment back.
As far as Wargaming goes, though, they have much bigger problems than this.
Yes, subs are awful, yes, if they release them into the live build the game is as good as dead for me and many others. But in this case that's actually not a sunk cost fallacy. They are desperately trying to lure old players back by introducing features as quickly as possible.
The company is failing. They are an overblown company whose products are unable to support its structure. They managed to get WoT into a semi-stable state, but it's not enough because neither Warplanes nor WoWs are helping. They are hemorrhaging money and players and they will use more and more desperate measures to turn it around.
They chose a wrong tactic, of course. Instead of fixing what's broken (DDs are unplayable whenever there is a CV in the game, useless AA, even on purpose builds, power creep, basically the whole Russian navy, for crying out loud, instead of fixing unstable EU servers after downsizing, they offered everybody free transfer to NA!,...) they are introducing more and more outrageous monetization and features that will break the game even more and drive the rest of the playerbase away.
So in their case it's not sunk cost fallacy but simply grasping at straws.
