You don't have your facts straight. it was always advertised as a BETA and the game had 20 million players at it's peak, won Fighting Game of the Year awards, still has 90% postive reviews on steam, and was the best selling game of July 2022 solely off Founders Packs and microtransactions. Far from a flop.
They took it offline for a year because the dev team was too small to keep up with their content map and live service maintenance, so instead of struggle bussing they went back to the drawing board and rebuilt the entire game AND net code together for the full release. They also added new maps, characters, game modes, and adjusted actual mechanics and added moves.