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.
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.
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.
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.
They already took their millions in Tencent money and ran with it.
https://www.polygon.com/highguard-funding-tencent/
3.2 Concords almost sounds good. For comparison, Black Ops 2 is currently at 347 Concords
Not as glamorous if you consider that Liz Truss lasted 3.5 Concords in office, and a rotting head of lettuce exceeded even that.
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.