Why did Minecraft Earth fail?

After Roblox's huge success in its public market debut, my colleagues and I started to follow closer on the multiverse landscape. Naturally, we started to think about multiverse in the context of AR (augmented reality) as our product, MARK is an AR gaming/social product. However, one of the biggest questions that came up immediately was, "If this (multiverse) is going to work, why does Minecraft Earth failed?".

This snippet will be about our comments on why we think Minecraft Earth failed.

• COVID 19: This is probably what everyone is assuming about given that ME is a location based game which requires users to go out into the real world. However, if we look at another location based game like Pokemon GO, it still broke record revenue despite facing the lockdown problem. With that said, we don't believe that COVID is the root cause of ME's failure and at best only a minor catalyst.
• Hardware limitation due to the AR first approach: AR is a technology that requires a lot of computing power. The user experience is certainly not optimal or even unbearable for lower end devices (iPhone X equivalent or below). Therefore, majority of products either make AR as a secondary function or AR experience as an option to compromise market pentation and user adoption. And until either AR ships in another form factor or the tech stack become more efficient, AR first might not be a great idea for any consumer facing product.
• Lack of location context: Unlike Pokemon Go, ME did not leverage location context enough to entice users to interact and venture with the real world. As the result, there is no real different to build inside vs outside. Without building outdoor, there's one less reason for user to go outdoor for collecting material. The loop between building and tapping game play should be much closer together.  
• Persistence AR: The ME trailer that came out initially can easily mislead players to think that what they have created in ME can be saved and visited by other people in the game. Quoting from one of the comments of a beta tester, "Yeah that's what I think a lot of people thought it was gonna be (persistence). Like imagine walking around in a city and seeing peoples builds around." However, one can only experience other player's "world" while the other player is next to you and actively playing in the world. Without the ability to see what others has build easily anytime, the overall value of the multiverse thesis in ME is much less as the core concept is to experience what others had built.