Highguard is dead.
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Was it ever alive?
Dead on announcement.
They had a somewhat decent 100k concurrent players but that number kept dropping like a rock.
For less than a day. Because it's F2P. People tried it and immediately deinstalled it.
An update is sorta like arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, ain't it?
But they’re adding account level progression … for the one week left.
And skill trees! Don't forget about the skill trees!
Sure, but it's a show of goodwill to release the content that you had been working on for future patches.
If the work on it was already done, you might as well release it. Published work looks better re-hiring-wise. You can point to some emote or firing animation and say "that was my doing. I didn't choose the game or the vision, but that little part did look good, didn't it? I can make good small parts for your game, too."
That's a point I overlooked.
we might be seeing the end of the production of live service games.
Are they going away? obviously not.
Are they proving to be unable to build a sustainable playerbase time and time again? obviously so.
I am betting this will be the year investors shy away from live service game production entirely.
Live service is basically impossible to crack into nowadays. Anyone who plays live service has 2-3 main ones that they rotate between and breaking into that rotation/replacing one is very difficult.
Marvel Rivals pulled it off in late 2024, which really put a damper on the Concord defense of “it’s impossible to make it in this field.” And it REALLY highlighted the difference in character design philosophy between those two games. Heck, Helldivers 2 found success earlier in 2024.
That said, it IS a tough nut to crack and a formula for success seems unattainable. It’s worth trying as much as any other business venture. It’s NOT worth spending a half billion dollars chasing the dream. As always when it comes to western devs these days, there is a retarded fear of reining in budgets. That’s what’s really hurting them.
Marvel had the advantage of the preestablished ip worth hundreds of millions though, all devs had to do is make it not suck
That still asking for a lot. Remember that Avengers game?
Not to mention that it did come in around the time the previous king of the genre Overwatch was coming in, which is doubly surprising given that almost everyone agrees hero shooters are past their prime as a genre. Especially considering that early last year Paladins has gone into maintenance mode after nine years of content updates.
not just games too, this is entertainment in general.
I'm friends with a film professional who has been working his hardest to be a professional filmmaker since he exited film school. he's got some good stuff under his belt, including documentaries in war zones and other dangerous parts of the world.
I once asked him if he won the lottery what it would take to do his dream film.
"fair" I thought, it's good to dream big. I then asked him if he could be the director of a budget feature length film, what kind of budget he would need.
that's where I scoffed. the original Halloween movie was made for $325,000 (1.6 million in today's dollars. Rocky was made for $1 million (less than $6 million in today's dollars) and that movie had large crowds of extras. The Good The Bad and The Ugly was considered to have an extravagant budget for its time, and they spent only $1.2 million (just over 12 million in today's dollars).
in chasing the film industry, he is far from the richest man in the world. yet he had no idea how a feature length movie could possibly be made for under a million dollars.
I don't think anyone has an idea of how expensive any venture is until they're done with it. Underestimating the budgets seems to be common with video game designers.
Yeah, this seems to be a persistent problem in media as a whole. I think the fact that companies are trying to push the limits of graphics beyond all reason is a part of that, considering the hardware crisis.
The graphics chase was expensive 15 or 20 years ago, but these days it's negligible just given how streamlined tech is that enables both movie and video game production to achieve photorealism at relatively low costs. It's why we see so many one and two-man projects like Bright Memory or Bodycam look better than most AAA titles but were made on peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich budgets.
The main issue is there is a lot of bloat and waste; it's something Robert Rodriguez talked about at length and lamented the way Hollywood did things during a speech he gave at University of Arizona more than two decades ago.
They all seem to want to build themselves to be too big to succeed.
Yea, there's only so much time in the day and people are saturated with live service games. It's simply too much of a time investment to start a new one.
I think this is just the MMORPG problem but for the current generation.
There's a finite market to draw on for these sorts of online time sinks and once the biggest players are established it becomes difficult to dislodge them but companies will pour millions of dollars into trying to generate the next WoW killer and burn out in the attempt.
Bean counters chasing the established trends
I'm out of the loop. Is this Concord 2 or 3?
2, Marathon will probably be 3
Marathon beta on PS5 has an awful review average. It's going to be fun watching the train wreck.
Extraction shooters are the new Battle Royale. The community is going to burn out on them even faster because it's a model that rewards toxicity.
I'd say King of Meat was Concord 2. They beat Highguard by a few days in announcing they're shutting down.
Was King of Meat high budget? It's gotta cost a lot to be a Concord level fuck up
Haven't found total numbers but it was a big Amazon production that expected 100k concurrent players and bought PR videos from Mr Beast and Geoff Keighley. Considering what they expected from the game and how much they spent on marketing it probably wasn't cheap.
They're demaking Marathon? Sad.
45 days.
Wasn't this mostly reported to have been funded by the Chinese? While those companies probably can write something like this off, I think they were up to something else. They are smarter than that.
Highguard did require kernel-level anti-cheat to be installed, so that's one thing to consider seriously.
X
How much did this game cost? $10M? $100M? Over four years.
And at no point did anyone check to see if anyone wanted to play it.
You know what? Respect for releasing more content that they had in the pipeline even on their way out the door. They didn't have to do that. They could have just said "yeah we're just pulling the plug next week. Peace out.", but they didn't. For everything they did wrong, this little piece right here is something they've done right.
I guess. But level progression (and 5 v 5) is shit that should’ve been there from the start. The fact it wasn’t leaves this at “they’ve only themselves to blame.” They were given the spotlight and proceeded to deliver subpar product.
The best thing they could have done is what was done with Dragon Quest X and Mega Man X Dive.
Release the game with full content as a completely offline version.
It's not like you're doing anything ELSE with it.
At least it was F2P. Shutting servers down 45 days after launch would have been so much worse if anyone had paid for it.
Lol
This is the first time I'm hearing of Highguard. Did I miss anything?
OverWatch HighGuard
Its a copycat arena hero shooter that was shilled at TGA and nobody really cared about it.
You missed the "Brocoli Haircut brown" and "Arnold Schwarzenegger with tits" hero shooter F2P that most players found bad.
2 million? Is this some over inflated number like 6 million?
And yet Blizzard can support Heroes of the Storm for years on what, I'm sure, is a FRACTION of the playerbase. And it even gets updates! And this is Micro$oft Activizzard, stealer of breast-milk and unpersoner supreme, THE scumbag company. Even they can go "eeeh, we got, what, 500 players? It's not THAT big a load on our servers, it runs off the SC2 and WC3 combined server anyways, let it keep running".
What went on at their company that they couldn't do a "maintenance mode" and had to do an "end of life"?
I bet I'm too late with my nostradamus forecast here, but I bet there's a 'highguard didn't flop' being written, or maybe already exists.
So yeah, it didn't flop. It was murdered before it got out the gate. It wasn't allowed to be a game when the people making it can't be told they're not doing something that people are going to want to play.
Toxic positivity killed it before it got out into the world.
The release date was Jan 26th. It didn't last until March 26th.
How many millions went into the game did that translate to in days?
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/highguard-didnt-flop/
Someone with better meme skills than I have, remember that don't copy that floppy guy from the anti piracy ads of the late 80s and early 90s?
How about: don't sloppa my floppa.