Submitted 14 hours ago by rtxn@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
Archived article: archive.md/HONwC
“We don’t need player counts to be super huge in order to be successful” is starting to ring hollow.
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.
What’s Highguard?
Hey… At least it lasted longer than Concord. 🤷♂️
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.
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.
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 wouldn‘t 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 heard the most recent playtest brought some hype back. Did you play it?
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).
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 don’t think it will see any huge success. It will probably find a loyal fanbase, but probably not enough to sustain it long term.
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.
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.
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:
God am I sick of all this games as a service season pass loot box shit.
🤦
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.
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.
It’s a PvP hero shooter + siege + looter + capture the flag + demolition all in one game.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It didn‘t sell so no, it‘s not simply a grift. It’s just that nobody wanted it.
Google says they started development in 2022. I’m guessing Overwatch 2 going FTP in January made it seem like the genre was growing instead of trending sideways.
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 and it built out its vision. But Geoff swooping in and saying it’ll be the next, greatest game did it zero favors.
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.
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 couldn’t 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.
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.
sonofearth@lemmy.world 53 minutes ago
If it’s unsustainable for you, release the server and game source code for someone else to host it and patch it. Why waste developers’ time and effort into making of this game?!
uienia@lemmy.world 45 minutes ago
Nothing to salvage from that mess of a live-service slop.