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.
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.
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 I‘d 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. It‘s simply not that easy. I think it‘s 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.
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.
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?!
It’s insane that this isn’t a requirement for shutting down/delisting a game.
Whose requirement? Government game laws? Just don’t play this garbage.
Yes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m not interested either way, but my money says it’ll do okay
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.
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:
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.
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
- adds account level progression and skill trees
- game shuts down forever in a week
🤦
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.
“How could Gamers™️ 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!
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.
It’s a PvP hero shooter + siege + looter + capture the flag + demolition all in one game, if that’s your alley.
And it got the best announcement spot at the GOTY awards show, which is wild.
What’s Highguard?
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 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 of that year made it seem like the genre was growing instead of trending sideways.
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.
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.
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…
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.
