Can't say I'm surprised. It was being promoted for two and a half years before testing started, and then as people have noted, the testing phase was pretty much the last six months while constantly promoting it by releasing new character images every week.

That will probably ruin Jagex, as they've spent three years funding the creation of this game (through wages and electronic materials to develop and house the program), and they are fully refunding people who had so far bought into the game.

I feel really bad for them, because they were really excited (back in 2012 when they started promoting it at BotCon), but they either chose the wrong universe (TFPrime) or were forced to by Hasbro.
The Gen1 universe might have a smaller core of dedicated fans, but the universe itself doesn't appear to have an expiry date, so could have gone on forever (like the Legends game). TFPrime on the other hand, was like Animated and other previous series since Beast Wars... once the cartoon and toyline were over, there was not enough interest in those versions of characters and storyline to keep people with it when new series or movies come along.
Gen1, as we've seen by the constant stream of homage toys and recycling of iconic names and colours, is time-less. And if Jagex had done that universe, and that style of bots (like the non-cast characters you'd see in backgrounds of cartoons and comics) or even an Animated universe done in that Animated visual style, I think they'd have had a lot more interest, and a lot more patience when it was finally finished... lasting a lot longer than a game based on a subsequent universe that has completely ended with no significant lingering legacy.