This happened with C&C4, which many scratched their heads over. When the press asked them why they took such a U-turn for the franchise, their response was "we wanted to make something really new, not just C&C3.5". A lot of the dev team were laid off after the game was done though. When they were interviewed later we got the real story. The game was originally an experimental F2P project for the Asian market. Some suits saw it and told them "let's turn this into a boxed product and call it C&C4".