Yeah since they explicitly say performance met mangement expectations, I suspect they knew ahead of time that it's going to bomb, so they took Epic's money and thereby guaranteed some monetary return at least.

It's a shame, because while I loved SR3 (and enjoyed SR4 and even GOOH albeit I could not stand playing as Johnny), Agents of Mayhem and now the new Saints Row showed that not only is the humor outdated by modern standards and they didn't know how to modernize it, they also couldn't even properly recreate the actual humor the way it was.