Highguard will permanently shut down on March 12th.
3d 7h ago by lemmy.world/u/rtxn in games from www.gamesradar.com
Archived article: https://archive.md/HONwC
They'll release one more update (my guess is whatever release-ready content they've already got), then the servers will shut down next Thursday.
"We don't need player counts to be super huge in order to be successful" is starting to ring hollow.
Hey... At least it lasted longer than Concord. š¤·āāļø
I do feel slightly bad for the dev team. A lotta stuff outside their control spun things out of hand; but I also don't think it would have had any success regardless of the whole situation. At least what happened got it some attention and gave it a chance.
By "dev team", I'm guessing you mean the artists, designers, programmers, and testers; the people who spent the last five or so years actually creating the game. Yes, it sucks for them. Their years of work have effectively been thrown in the trash because of Wildlight's management. I hope they find better work soon, and I hope the management become personae non gratae in the industry.
Honestly it's the same thing with Concord, and it's part of why it sucks to hear a lot of shit talk toward the devs of these games. Anyone who's actually tried either game could tell the dev teams really did put their all into it and wanted to make something interesting and fun, but you can feel the c-suite decisions and live service bullshit weighing them down. Like if the game isn't an instant hit, it gets shut down, and all that work thrown away. It really fucking sucks for the folks who actually put the work in.
I feel like the exact same thing's gonna happen with Marathon too. Playtest this week was met with pretty mixed results, people either loved it or hated it. The actual devs are incredible, and having spent far too much time with D2 before dropping it, I've gotten to know a few folks on the team and can really vouch for them. But I can't vouch for their management whatsoever, and they're the reason I dropped that game entirely and will never touch another Bungie game. I have zero faith in Bungie management keeping this one alive.
Playtest this week was met with pretty mixed results, people either loved it or hated it.
Honestly, that shouldn't be bad. Not all games need to appeal to everybody. Take ARMA, for example. It would do shit on a playtest, but the group who likes it does it for some of the reasons the rest would hate it. I think we need to switch a bit from "fuck this game, it's not for me" to "I don't care about it, it's not for me. If it's for you that's fine"
Oh absolutely, but we know what happens with mixed feedback in this industry today
Yes, of course. They want a "everybody, all the time" service game.
They already took their millions in Tencent money and ran with it.
https://www.polygon.com/highguard-funding-tencent/
It was also free, unlike Concord.
Even if Concord was free, it still would have had less players than Highguard. Nobody wanted to play Concord, at least some people wanted to play Highguard.
3.2 Concords almost sounds good. For comparison, Black Ops 2 is currently at 347 Concords, and Team Fortress 2 is at 480
Not as glamorous if you consider that Liz Truss lasted 3.5 Concords in office, and a rotting head of lettuce exceeded even that.
That's crazy. I guess it's good practice to never pick up live service games because you'll be rolling the dice. I'm glad I pretty much play single player games exclusively.
I genuinely wouldnāt say so. The game shuts down because nobody played it anyway. The chances you pick up a game no one plays is pretty slim by nature. But even if you have been burned in the past you can just pick up one that is already popular.
Pre-ordering on the other hand is rarely a good idea and that goes for any game, not just live service.
Every live service shuts down because not enough people were playing, eventually. Even ones I loved. I've got multiplayer games from 25 years ago that I can still play, but I can't still play the ones from 10 years ago.
Well they could release the server software before shutting down the service, they wouldn't lose anything.
They'd still have to patch out their anti-cheat. And I'm guessing neither of those things are going to happen.
And have one more competing product if they ever decide to try again? How dare you! :D
disclaimer: I know nothing about the game, the studio, or their future plans, I'm just pulling stuff out of my ass
On one hand developers should always give players a way to play their games indefinitely. That should be a basic consumer right and I hope Stop Killing Games can change something.
But on the other hand I would lie if I said Iād actually use it. I never had the desire to hop into a dead online game out of curiosity and I think at least 99.9% of players feel the same way. Because what makes these games great is the active community.
These things came and went after popularity faded. They need people to stay invested to legitimize their own existence. Pure nostalgia is not enough to preserve games even if developers release the server code. Itās simply not that easy. I think itās important to be aware that communities make online games great and when there is no community then there is no game.
Highguard could release their server code tomorrow, but more people would mock them for it than applaud them. Virtually nobody would play it still.
Virtually nobody is still not nobody. Being able to continue to play it is important not just as a failed piece of art that we can all learn from but also as something that gives it value in the first place. We had the ability to spend money in Highguard, but the value I might get out of that spend depends on the game's continued existence. If that existence is guaranteed in some way, then I no longer have that barrier. Every live service game has this conundrum, which might explain why they either immediately die or become the next big thing, with very little in between.
I never had the desire to hop into a dead online game out of curiosity and I think at least 99.9% of players feel the same way.
I still play CoD: Modern Warfare 2 (the first one that was called that) multiplayer, using a third party client for a game that was basically dead by like 2014.
Some games are just good, and the flavor of the week stuff sometimes isn't as good.
All live service games will end eventually but a two month run is ridiculous, hahaha.
That's becoming my takeaway here as well. Don't jump into any live service game early, because it might get rug-pulled right as I'm getting into it.
Of course, if everyone took this approach then no live service game will ever take off, which kinda feels like where we are anyways.
Considering that this was just a PvP, you're not losing much in picking it up as long as you don't spend money on it. It was kinda cool to try it out for one game and realise it wasn't ever gonna be my cup of tea.
Marathon next? Place your bets ladies and gentlemen!
Marathon is probably life or death for Bungie. Sony can't exactly afford to put out a mid game after spending so much on the studio... and "mid" is exactly what Marathon felt like. Just like so many copycats during the battle royale boom.
I don't think it will fail (or if it does, not as hard as Highguard), but unless it manages to stand out from the Tarkov/Arc Raiders/Hunt: Showdown oligopoly, it won't bring in the numbers to please Sony.
Idk I played the play test and it was easily one of the better extraction shooters. Bungie has gun play locked in. But they shot themselves in the foot with BattlEye linux support and my new linux build is literally being put together this week. So regardless, I won't be buying it when it launches cause it wont run on linux.
post build specs please
Case: O11 Compact
Board: MSI 870e Edge TI Wifi
CPU: Ryzen 9 9950 x3D
GPU: XFX RX 9070 xt
PSU: Lian Li EG1000G
Cooler: Lian Li Hydroshift 2 LCD
It took me over a year to get it all together and all of the expensive components were gifts
Whatās your RAM situation looking like?
32 gbs. Caught at the first sign of upturn on the RAM crisis.
Edit: 32 DDR5
Mid is exactly how I have seen Marathon described by the server slam feedback. People vasalating between whether or not they like it immediately after starting to play it is not a great look.
I was expecting mid/boring but quite enjoyed it. Not normally an extraction shooters player, though, so we'll see how it fairs with the target audience.
To be honest at this point toppling Embark Studios is pretty tough in my book. The games they make have the same feeling of passion that Bungie used to have. Great gun play, fantastic audio design and interesting ideas. I really hope for the best for Marathon, if for no other reason than competition drives creativity, but Bungie has had the soul sucked out of them unfortunately.
I heard the most recent playtest brought some hype back. Did you play it?
People who enjoy hardcore pvp and extraction shooters are hyped... but the important question is whether or not those people represent a large enough niche to sustain a game with such a massive budget.
I'm guessing no, but who knows.
Not a lot, just enough to get the feel of the game, but also to realize that I'm not the target audience. In some ways, it's similar to Counter-Strike 1.6 or Team Fortress 2 back in high school: if I have a group of friends and an hour of free time, then sure, I might hop on. But I won't be investing the time and long-term effort that an extraction shooter expects of me.
The moment to moment experience is good. Bungie haven't forgotten how to create a tight FPS experience. But the game needs both longevity and a healthy playerbase, that's what concerns me. Fans of hardcore extraction shooters already have Tarkov and Hunt, and casual players already have Arc Raiders. It takes something exceptional to move players out of their "home" game.
Marathon seems pretty good imo, it's problem is it's trying to be a more hardcore extraction shooter than the ones that already exist which is gonna make it too niche to sustain a large US-based studio like Bungie.
Marathon is the complete opposite of ARC Raiders in the fact that it essentially forces/encourages you to fight. I give it like 2 months before all the casuals go back to ARC because of spawn rushers (they were already doing that during the server slam). And while Delta Force Operations kinda behaves similarly, they do have some ways to reign in the sweats by having multiple maps, multiple difficulties with gear caps, and a ton of other things that prevent bad players from getting farmed 24/7.
DOA is my guess but they'll probably prop it up for a month or so.
Given how boring it is to watch others play it, I donāt think it will see any huge success. It will probably find a loyal fanbase, but probably not enough to sustain it long term.
If only because Bungie itself has a strangely loyal legacy fanbase. I don't know how big it is at this point however.
I'm not interested either way, but my money says it'll do okay
If itās unsustainable for you, release the server and game source code for someone else to host it and patch it. Why waste developersā time and effort into making of this game?!
It's insane that this isn't a requirement for shutting down/delisting a game.
That's literally what the "stop killing games" movement was/is pushing for, at least in Europe. Really hope it goes somewhere, but it's kind of stopped making noise lately (at least that I'm hearing), what with the US speed-running fascism more and more every single week.
As I knew it, it was about releasing binaries/selfhostability not source code.
Ah, good point, it didn't require source code release so much as self-hostability in some form.
SKG (archived on their own YT channel not Ross) did a press conference recently and various politicals were there siding with the movement. It's still slow but ongoing progress.
That's good to hear.
Whose requirement? Government game laws? Just don't play this garbage.
Yes.
I'm convinced it is some sort of insurance fraud a la The Producers. They found a way to make more money by flopping HARD than getting middling success, and flopping hard is a LOT LESS work. If their choice is A) spend a lot of money and time making a really good game that will capture the attention of the entire market; or B) spend a bit of money and time making something that looks convincingly like a real attempt at making a good game to some corpo-fuckwits at an insurance company and then nuke it hours after release... Well. Yea, they'll do the second one.
From how I understand it, TenCent pulled funding in the studio as soon as the game didn't hit its metric goals, they fired all but 11 people working on the game last month. If they have time to Port it, that would be awesome to make it open source, but I have a feeling the skeleton crew left probably doesn't have the ability.
I expect whoever made the decision is embarrassed and don't want a visible monument to their hubris.
Nothing to salvage from that mess of a live-service slop.
Honestly, I think gaming is done with new live service offerings.
Live service used to be a way to get a core-complete, feature-limited games in front of players earlier than if they were fully baked. This was actually good for everyone, as player feedback often guided roadmaps and changes. But now everyone expects every new game to be better than Fortnite, Overwatch, etc. on day one. This just won't ever happen.
Also, the gaming community of today is OBSESSED with popularity numbers (steam concurrents and twitch view count, mostly), and if players don't see that everyone else is playing a game then they won't play either. This is fucking dumb, but we are where we are.
And don't even get me started on gaming news and influencers, who seem like they love to hate. They bitch about being stuck with CoD, then shit on anything that could someday compete with it. It's baffling.
And yet Helldivers 2 comes out in 2024 and sets the world on fire. Seems to me that gaming is perfectly fine with live service as long as it's in line with community expectations and not s soulless cash grab.
Highguard's leadership and at least one of their former devs said they were making this game in order to line their pockets.
They really never mentioned wanting to make a great game because they love these type of games.
It was they want a bigger piece of the pie and these games generate lots of revenue.
And don't even get me started on gaming news and influencers, who seem like they love to hate. They bitch about being stuck with CoD, then shit on anything that could someday compete with it. It's baffling.
Nothing gets more "engagement" like that. It's not even isolated to games, any other section of news gets the same treatment. It's a shit show of journalism that we have today.
Elden Ring: Nightreign is successful so far. But it's quite different from default live-service games, since a lot of content is available in single-player mode too.
And don't even get me started on gaming news and influencers, who seem like they love to hate.
Literally every gaming news media outlet and "influencer" when the topic is Xbox:
"Player feedback" is part of what makes most live services shit.
I don't want reddit designing my game.
God am I sick of all this games as a service season pass loot box shit.
Well apparently it didn't pay out for them, so you aren't the only one
High risk, high reward. At least 2 million players tried the game and said, "No thanks."
Real indie studios would kill to get those player numbers.
If those numbers weren't fudged. Steam only had 97k peak players. Usually those numbers are doubled on console. Not 2000% more.
Peak players is sampled at a point, the 2m number is probably cumulative.
- adds account level progression and skill trees
- game shuts down forever in a week
š¤¦
"How could Gamersā¢ļø DO THIS????" they'll scream, as their mediocre slopfest crashes and burns. Maybe they should've read the room a bit better before releasing Generic Hero Shooter #846169592.
They should have learned from Marvel Rivals and used an already well-known IP and all the thighs and tits they can get their hands on. You can't just make a shitty game and expect it to sell, you have to manipulate your players into thinking it's more than just a shitty game
Make one in final fantasy setting with its characters and I'm sold! Not a good things, but you're 100% correct!
No! Square Enix please don't jump on another game trend your weird NFT mobile slop games have already done irreparable damage to your image! (also pls invest more budget in FFXIV)
/slightly joking idrc what SE does
Are games like this grifts?
Build hype, get whatever cash you can, and then shut them down?
I don't see how this would be a grift. Tencent's funding seems to have been contingent on some kind of metric, and they pulled out because Highguard fell short.
From some interviews, it sounds like it was just an ambitious mess that didn't have good testers. IIRC, they said something about everyone pitching 5 ideas every day, and added a couple each time. And it really shows, it is some kind of franken-monster that combines all kinds of ideas that make a patchwork of meh. And then the testers they had either all worked on the game, or were friends with those that did, and nobody wanted to be a downer so they always gave positive feedback.
It didnāt sell so no, itās not simply a grift. Itās just that nobody wanted it.
That's just the marketing cycle.
Is marketing a grift? I mean, kinda. But you'll get marketing on good games and bad alike.
Nobody seemed to mind the endless marketing for Expedition 33 or Eldin Ring or Stardew Valley or Minecraft.
Google says they started development in 2022. I'm guessing Overwatch 2 going FTP in January of that year made it seem like the genre was growing instead of trending sideways.
No, it's a flop.
It's hard to believe that a company would spend hundreds of millions to develop a game, only for it to flop. But, that's how it works with live-service PVP only games. They depend on network effects. People want to play what their friends are playing. If a company gets this right they can be like Minecraft or Fortnite and it's the game everyone plays, bringing in billions of dollars. If they miss, it can be a complete flop that nobody plays.
Kind of.
More like throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Who could've seen this coming?
Yet another live service game shooting for the moon and not even lasting a month.
What a waste, make all these people spend years of their lives building a whole videogame and then immediately make it impossible for anyone to ever play it again. A company shouldn't have the right to erase a game from existence, even if it is a bad one.
I must have been under a rock. This is my fist time hearing about this game. I guess I have a week to check it out and hopefully not like it.
Itās a PvP hero shooter + siege + looter + capture the flag + demolition all in one game, if thatās your alley.
And it got the best announcement spot at the GOTY awards show, which is wild.
What's Highguard?
"Why aren't people dumping thousands of hours into our video game while the economy is in the toilet?"
released [...] on January 26, 2026. The studio has announced that the game will be shutting down on March 12, 2026.
What the fuck is happening in "triple-a" game dev world?
These games are build with a budged so high they either have to rival overwatch in its glory days or they get scrapped and written off as a loss since they will never be profitable.
Triple A studios have arrived in the corporate world a while ago were long term profits are irrelevant if your quarterly earnings aren't what the investors want.
Gambling, pretty much. They go all in on a bet that it will explode and make tons of money, take out loans based on that expectation, setting themselves in a position where either it is a major success or it is an utter failure, no in between.
The gaming market is so saturated these days that it's kinda baffling this approach is still being taken. Like I hadn't even heard of this game before this.
The best part - they tried to pretend they're not AAA. They portrayed themselves as small, indie, self-publishing studio, whereas behind curtains the stream of money from Tencent was wide as a river
It worked for Dave the Diver.
Except the studio behind Dave the diver is very vocal about not being indi - it's just the graphics so everyone assumes it
It is working for overwatch, why is it not working for me? I want to be like cs2.
The hubris lol... Oh the hubris!
"Who needs beta testing or early access, we made Anthem, this will be brilliant! Who needs a staff, we can run it with the bare minimum."
Feel sad for all the devs who already lost their jobs a few weeks back n now these last few left but fuck that company! Thought they could simply profit off all the work from their staff by sacking them all immediately after release.
Sometimes companies do get exactly what they deserve.
I feel like Geoff really did a disservice to this game. It might actually could have ramped up some dedicated players as it built out its vision. But Geoff swooping in and saying it'll be the next, greatest game did it zero favors.
2 million players gave the game a chance thanks to Geoff. I doubt the game would even get 1000 players if they decided to shadow drop it like they originally intended.
The fact that they laid off most of their staff just weeks after release shows that they couldnāt afford a slow ramp up.
I agree completely. There's only one chance to make a first impression. The final ad slot of TGA needs a worthy game that the audience can be excited about, and putting the most generic, most corporate-looking game there felt like an insult. Kind of like this absolute flop.
Too be fair, TGA doesn't seem to have historically given a lot of weight to the last spot. And they probably should, because of the public perception of the last spot being inherently prestigious. But it doesn't seem like they were trying to say it's some sort of capstone or anything. By all accounts he just thought it looked neat and threw it in the last open spot.
Idk if they had the time or money to quietly release it and ramp up over time, Tencent was likely asking where's their return on investment after years of funding and live service games kind of depend entirely on launch success to springboard future development.
build....a player base? should it be expected on day 1? idk
Never heard of this game, lol
Me neither, had to look it up. It launched on the 26th of January. That's an impressively short run.
Whenever a game like this flops it gives me hope. Why? Because this kind of game isn't something that interests me at all. I keep hoping that these companies are going to learn from getting burned, and switch to a style of game that I like more.
I can't help but think there's money in acquiring all these completed assets and coming up with a story based single player game around them.
The creative part is already done! Pop it into a non-GaaS structure and see what happens!
I'd have LOVED to explore the world of Brink and it was set up to be another Assassin's Creed Assassins vs. Templars vibe... and it all fell apart...
You think the responsible will be made responsible? No they will receive parachutes and bonuses as they swap to the next shorting mafia target
Lightning in a bottle, eh?
Never heard of it
Seriously, I didn't even realize it was the name of the game. I thought maybe a dev studio was shutting down.
Shame. The trailer looked really good, and if they'd had time to learn and improve from the feedback it could have really been something.
Ironic, considering the trailer is one of the things that was heavily criticized.
It looked very generic and didn't tell you much about the game.
I believe it was also revealed at some point that it was thrown together in a very short period of time because they didn't expect to need it then.
Glad this slop failed. Make better games.
Which one was that? The horses one?