True. The soft launch was very good, although the game had several problems of poor optimization for a lot of devices. But if your device could run the game fine, the game itself was very good. After the global launch, there were a lot of ads (I assume they think people in the West wouldn't spend money with the game, so now they get the money with ads), extra bugs, and it went waaaay downhill from there. After the 2.0 update, the game just became a pile of trash. They made the game even worse with that damn roulette (aka gambling), they reduced the power of all your companions (to a point where they could go up to level 5, but now they'll go up to level 10, requiring more gambling and they're still not going to be as powerful in level 10 as they were in level 5 before the update), added a lot of useless buddies (making it even worse to get the ones you want or level them up), they want ridiculous amounts of scores to clear a level (so you can get red rings for gambling without having to use actual money), they changed the prizes for clearing a level, not to mention the forced deaths they implemented, which caused so much rage around the internet that they turned off the servers for more than 48h just to take it back and then say in the next update, "We've fixed an issue where some obstacles would become unavoidable", as if that was actually an issue and not something they did on purpose. Seriously, this game has become severely greedy, just a big casino. It's kinda sad, because the game is quite addicting and very fun, but it became pretty bad due to the terrible managing they've done with it. If you look at Sonic Runners groups on Facebook, you'll see most of the people who are new to the game don't care, because they didn't know how the game was before, but about 95% is pretty unhappy with what happened to the game and many have just stopped playing it. In my opinion, Sonic Runners was the biggest disappointment from SEGA in 2015.
