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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?!
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Rules
1. Submissions have to be related to games
Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.
This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.
2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil
No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.
We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.
3. No excessive self-promotion
Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.
This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.
4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you’re submitting before posting to see if it’s already been posted.
We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.
5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW
Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.
No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.
6. No linking to piracy
Don’t share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.
We don’t want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.
🤦
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
You think the responsible will be made responsible? No they will receive parachutes and bonuses as they swap to the next shorting mafia target
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…
What’s Highguard?
“Why aren’t people dumping thousands of hours into our video game while the economy is in the toilet?”
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.
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 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.
It is working for overwatch, why is it not working for me? I want to be like cs2.
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
Hey… At least it lasted longer than Concord. 🤷♂️
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.
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.
They already took their millions in Tencent money and ran with it.
https://www.polygon.com/highguard-funding-tencent/
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.
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.
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
Glad this slop failed. Make better games.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are games like this grifts?
Build hype, get whatever cash you can, and then shut them down?
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.
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.
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.
It didn‘t sell so no, it‘s not simply a grift. It’s just that nobody wanted it.
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.
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?!
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.
I expect whoever made the decision is embarrassed and don’t want a visible monument to their hubris.
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.
Nothing to salvage from that mess of a live-service slop.
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.