This article sucks and didn’t actually explain why upstart failed.
Saying it failed because it was unpopular is idiotic. Why was it unpopular? What did other distro maintainers say about the canonical license? Why was Red Hat working on a separate solution instead of upstart? Why did upstart not provide additional features like systemd did? What made canonical pull the plug? There are so many questions and no answers to explain upstart’s failure.
All ambitious games have problems on launch. If the studio is any good, these usually get cleaned up over the following six months or so. I’ve played over 100 hours. Game is fun.