The funny thing to me is: these games didn’t just creep up and were made in the past 6 months.
These companies made these decisions years ago, think highguard was 2022 or something.
So these guys made a market bet, and lost it. That’s what we’re witnessing with these Concord-esque flops.
That would be true in a vacuum, but there have been plenty of examples of “good” games completely fizzling out simply because they were unremarkable in a saturated market. Lawbreakers was a fairly well-received objective-based team shooter with interesting movement mechanics. It was killed off because it couldn’t compete with Overwatch for players’ time. Then there are the countless battle royale games released during the reign of PUBG and Fortnite, and all the wannabe Halo-killers, CoD-killers, WoW-killers… history is littered with the corpses of “good” but otherwise unremarkable games that thought they were the shit.
Highguard isn’t just a failure of a game, it’s a failure on the studio’s part to learn the lesson: players’ time and attention are limited resources, and you need to be exceptional to compete in a saturated market.
They didn’t just make a bet. They made a bet on the horse with broken legs.
And Peak was made in under a year.
It’s almost like making the same corporate “games as a service” garbage that is already proven to be a failure again was a bad idea. Maybe one day this will be learned, but I bet hundreds of more millions of dollars will be wasted trying again in the future.
It won’t be learned cause the ones who suffer are not the ones making the decisions.
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Honestly they should have made something much smaller to make a name for themselves then slowly build up to something larger like a Highguard. You can’t make a sort of shadow drop like they did by being “former devs” of a game when in almost all instances of that marketing has failed. It’s just dumb to try and start with something as big as Highguard even disregarding the problems with the game.
Bad management all around.
There’s probably money to be made in purchasing the IP of these failed live service games and using the assets and art to make good single player games with an actual story.
I’d play the hell out of an Assassin’s Creed ish game in the Brink universe.
The juice may not be worth the squeeze there, but there might be money in buying the IPs for pennies on the dollar and releasing dead games as self hostable with bots to fill out a match.
I’m not sure if that is a good idea, because the assets are cursed now.
