2.0 was by all metrics pretty successful, but thats mostly because HH had not been updated since 2012, a lot of the minis where really starting to show their age, and the community was slowly moving away. From the people who where used to playing their system for almost 10 years before GW cared enough to relaunch it, there wasn't really any way they can get them to buy a new edition less than 3 years after launch. I think 3.0 would have been more successful had they waited maybe 5y after 2.0's launch, considering they kept on releasing 2.0 campaign books up until the 3.0 announcement, so a lot of people basically got a month or so with their new rules before they where obsolete.
Right, and it isn't just models that seems to have put a lot of people off about it. Making the game "faster" by cutting it down to only being 4 rounds while simultaneously making the charge phase into a clunky mess leaving people wondering what GW was thinking. I think it's 5-6 pages for the charge rules? Fucking up people's already built armies by making loadouts unusable(saying one or two things is different is one thing, doing it for half an army is ridiculous). It's also kind of apparent when the wahapedia, newrecruit, etc. equivalents are slow to update(if at all) and people can't even be bothered to share around a PDF of the thing.
This is purely anecdotal, but I saw people picking up HH 2.0 and getting into it as new players or converting from 40k, or just playing it alongside 40k and that's good for any business with grognards moving on or dying(lets be real, it was a lot of old grognards) because you're getting more people to add to a "leaky bucket/bathtub". HH 3.0 doesn't appear to have onboarded many new players, and drove off a bunch of dedicated players or people are still playing 2.0 or a variety of houserules instead which can make a game even more impenetrable for someone genuinely interested because they build their army a certain way and find out it doesn't work that way due to the houserules their local community might be using for army lists, terrain interactions, missions, and so on. Yes, within a couple months of release people were already making up sets of houserules for the game because they just didn't like it, or managed to get bored already if they didn't switch back to 2.0 instead.
I figured if anyone had a reasonable video about it from a few months after launch it'd be Winters SEO, and it looks like I was right. A bunch of the positive early videos for it were just using the quick start rules or were simply shilling because they had to make a positive video about the huge free box of plastic they just received and then didn't bother covering it much or at all after(because they never cared in the first place).
So yeah unless the game turned out to be wildly popular in Japan or something where there's basically little communication outside of communities there due to the moon runes barrier, it seems like the shit flopped. What the community was openly vocal about wanting was a HH 2.5 of sorts, and that clearly didn't happen.
