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.
“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!
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.
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…
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 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 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.
Literally every gaming news media outlet and “influencer” when the topic is Xbox:
“Player feedback” is part of what makes most live services shit.
I don’t want reddit designing my game.
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.
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.
“Why aren’t people dumping thousands of hours into our video game while the economy is in the toilet?”
build…a player base? should it be expected on day 1? idk
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.
- adds account level progression and skill trees
- game shuts down forever in a week
🤦
Glad this slop failed. Make better games.
released […] on January 26, 2026. The studio has announced that the game will be shutting down on March 12, 2026.
What the fuck is happening in “triple-a” game dev world?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They already took their millions in Tencent money and ran with it.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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 heard the most recent playtest brought some hype back. Did you play it?
Not a lot, just enough to get the feel of the game, but also to realize that I’m not the target audience. In some ways, it’s similar to Counter-Strike 1.6 or Team Fortress 2 back in high school: if I have a group of friends and an hour of free time, then sure, I might hop on. But I won’t be investing the time and long-term effort that an extraction shooter expects of me.
The moment to moment experience is good. Bungie haven’t forgotten how to create a tight FPS experience. But the game needs both longevity and a healthy playerbase, that’s what concerns me. Fans of hardcore extraction shooters already have Tarkov and Hunt, and casual players already have Arc Raiders. It takes something exceptional to move players out of their “home” game.
People who enjoy hardcore pvp and extraction shooters are hyped… but the important question is whether or not those people represent a large enough niche to sustain a game with such a massive budget.
I’m guessing it won’t be, but who knows.
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.
post build specs please
Case: O11 Compact Board: MSI 870e Edge TI Wifi
CPU: Ryzen 9 9950 x3D
GPU: XFX RX 9070 xt
PSU: Lian Li EG1000G
Cooler: Lian Li Hydroshift 2 LCDIt took me over a year to get it all together and all of the expensive components were gifts
What’s your RAM situation looking like?
32 gbs. Caught at the first sign of upturn on the RAM crisis.
Edit: 32 DDR5
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.
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.
If only because Bungie itself has a strangely loyal legacy fanbase. I don’t know how big it is at this point however.
DOA is my guess but they’ll probably prop it up for a month or so.
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).
I’m not interested either way, but my money says it’ll do okay
