Yea, this is common practice and most of the time you never hear about it, especially if a game is canceled before announcement. Last project I worked on, we couldn’t even take screenshots for our portfolios after it was canceled. Leading to most everyone on the team having a two-year gap where they did great work and had absolutely nothing to show for it.
rtxn@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This is the main reason Concord’s entirely avoidable failure pissed me off so much. Wildlight’s designers and artists spent years creating an entire game’s worth of assets (they lacked style and identity, but they weren’t bad) and now the game is dead, the studio is dead, and nobody will ever see or use those assets for something better.
eupraxia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Ok wait what? Was the game not called Concord? What’s Wildlight? I’m confused.
rtxn@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Wildlight is a game development studio made up of former Respawn developers who (allegedly) worked on the Titanfall and Apex Legends games. Highguard was their first game: a pointless, live service, content incomplete multiplayer shooter. It was revealed in late 2025 as the final showcase of The Game Awards, which resulted in a collective sigh of frustration from the audience. The game was released on the 26th of January to a decent peak player count of over 100k (97k players on Steam). It was immediately clear that the game was in a terrible state and it couldn’t retain the players. Two weeks after launch, Wildlight fired most of its staff because Tencent, which had been secretly funding the development, had pulled out. It was later announced that servers would shut down on the 12th of March, 45 days after launch.
Even before launch, it was mockingly compared to Concord, another pointless. live service, content incomplete, competitive multiplayer shooter that only lived for two weeks.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The meme was because it was clearly expensive and also so obviously going to flop, much like Concord. The difference in the money wasted between the two was probably an order of magnitude more for Concord though.