That term "focus" seemed to come up a fair amount. While he clearly stated that he had no clue what the remaining team would be doing with SiN, he did speak some to the experience of the first episode and work on the second. After putting one and a half years into building the foundation and first episode many suspected that it had failed to live up to expectations. True, it may not have been a spectacular success, but Mustaine explained that it did meet the studio's internal projections, though they were rather conservative. But he did express a feeling that the world hadn't been quite as ready for episodic content and digital delivery as they had banked on it being. The problems of being able to sell in stores also came up with him adding "we would have been better off selling it at $35 than $19. At 19 bucks it went straight to the shit bin in many places."

Along with marketing struggles, the team ran into new challenges once they got the first episode out the door. Mustaine explained, "we could have done episode 2 in 6 months, but we'd have needed double the team size just to keep up with the Half-Life 2 engine." As it turns out, hitching their wagon to Valve became as much a curse as blessing. Besides having to merge the code every time the engine was updated, it also drew inevitable comparisons to Half-Life 2. So, the lack of a gravity gun, for instance, stood out as something "missing" from SiN to some gamers. And then there were the distractions. With Original SiN -- the remake of SiN using the Source engine -- up and running, and the pull of doing multiplayer with the new episodic game Mustaine said that it was hard to keep focused on just cranking out the next episode.