Highguard Highlights the Problem with Engagement Bait | Unpacked

This is a great write up. It's the sad reality where engagement is king nowadays. Healthy and meaningful criticism is of course important, But, I think it's also important that people need to know between a constructive criticism and outright rage bait. Recently I saw a Facebook page posting about the new James Bond games where people were outrage about "non existent pc spec.". I was like, do people actually get angry because of that? Goodness me.

Player Count is just the most recent popular metric that is both fundementally meaningless and useless for determining the quality or value of game (like graphical specs).

That stealth Bytesized review drop was a great move

Great idea to do the video like this! Maybe instead of mining resources yourself you spawn in NPCs who do it for you, but need protecting?

Calling the game "woke" is just evidence that people who use the word as a derogatory have no idea what it means.

This is all on Geoff and TGA in my opinion. I don't think 95% of the ragebait videos get created if folks didn't feel like the initial reveal was a rug-pull. Agree with the general assessment of the media landscape being a cesspit and a nightmare for devs/creators to navigate, but with this specific game I think the scale of the negative response can be attributed to a single decision. And who knows, maybe it works out! It worked out for No Man's Sky! Sure it released to extremely negative reviews and many prospective fans who felt betrayed, but the hype did enable it to generate enough of a core audience to justify Hello Games continuing to plow resources into the project until it transformed into the beloved redemption story we have today. Maybe Highguard will pull off a similar trick, the pre-launch hype giving them a large enough player base to weather initial negativity and justify continued investment. Feels though that with a F2P title that is a narrower tightrope to tread.

Before the Bytesized kicked in, I was thinking... so this is a reaction to the prevalence of reaction videos. If you hadn't included the review, this would have been spectacularly ironic. As it is, nice save.