Not a surprise, unfortunately. X-wing, and Armada to a lesser extent, was a very good game when managed/produced by FFG. Asmodee's decision to put all of their miniature games in the hands of a company that had only fairly recently produced one game was going to be a death knell for some of the games. The very, very lukewarm reception to AMG's tenure of X-wing, 2.5 edition, and their complete lack of care about Armada, really showed that those two games were on the chopping block. AMG was focused on Marvel Crisis Protocol when they got X-wing, Legion, and Armada from FFG. They introduced Star Wars Shatterpoint, which is basically MCP in the SW universe, and kept up updates on Legion rules, but really never seemed to care about X-wing or Armada.
As a former X-wing player, I saw one of the main issues that foreshadowed the end was that 2nd edition had only been around for a couple of years before the game passed to AMG. FFG was in the process of re-releasing older ships from 1.0 to a new 2.0 standard, which meant giving them more pilot/upgrade options. This stopped when AMG got the game and they basically removed any remaining 1.0 ships from competitive play, annoying a lot of players who had a large collection of ships. The removal of the X-wing forums from FFG's excellent forum also had a major impact on the overall game- it was a great place for players to congregate and collaborate about the game. AMG did not have any sort of robust forum for its players, which lead to a splintering of the fanbase into 3rd-party social media sites (which had already been used, but the FFG forums were a main place for discussion about rules that had the ability for devs' to read/interact/inform players). For me, the writing was on the wall when AMG got the game- they were too small, didn't have enough experience, and already had their hands full with MCP doing fairly well, so they never had a chance to make X-wing or Armada work.
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