Highguard Didn’t Read the Room | Unpacked
This week's episode of Unpacked is now available!
Comments (6)
This is a perfect example of game culture in late stage capitalism. Intent is just to drive profit margins and improve shareholder value. There’s no thought given to advancing the form, high-quality gameplay, or even what gamers are asking for. And so the studio decided to make a quick buck and got burnt.
Feels like Tenect realized players weren't interested in another hero shooter so Tencent decided to release it as is (only 1 mode, 3 v 3) to avoid spending more on development & marketing for a game that wasn't going to land with players. Hard to disagree with Tencent's thinking on that given how few of the players that tried Highguard stuck around (not a defense of Tencent)
It's weird learning that suddenly there's a whole genre of realistic styled tactical shooters blowing up. I suppose tastes really are cyclical, it's the brown shooter era all over again. From the looks of it, them being a big contrast to hero shooters is probably part of what makes them, ironically, stand out at this point. And whoof, the devs crashing out on Twitter is some fremdshamen. Though still kinda funny. They probably should have spent some of that TenCent funding on actual marketing instead of relying on a favour, because as much as we all hate marketing departments, having the programmers do it works out about as well when they're writing the story and doing the voice acting too, apparently. Yahtzee also continues to have been right that the thing is with these games that are designed to use up as much of your time as possible, that even if you do everything right, the market can only support so many of them at a time. And it's probably the worst time to try to break into a market when it's clearly hit the point of saturation, because everyone's either gotten bored of it entirely, or picked their main game to stick with because it's where all their stuff is.
The milsim games look similar, but all have deep gameplay mechanics. I think that's more why people (myself included) gravitate towards them. They're often very team-focused, require communication, and have unique game modes.
Yeah, 100k players on day one would've invalidated the negativity online if the game was genuinely fun, but it didn't pull people in and no one came back. I'm surprised so many people got laid off so quickly now that I think about it, how much money were they hoping to make from this game so fast? Was it just the low amount of MTX purchases within those first few weeks serving as a sort of omen rather than not meeting a minimum MTX requirement?
According to Belular News, Highguard was likely funded by Tencent, back when loads of studios were getting money from the post-COVID high. Alas, that money dried up, and Wildfire had no choice but to release the game in its current state. Even as someone who enjoyed the game, it clearly needed more time, but they couldn't afford delays. That's why they couldn't take the Deadlock approach to get much needed feedback to tweak the gameplay. Without additional income, unless they got MTX money immediately, the layoffs were inevitable. And honestly, this sucks for the devs. They were in a no win situation. I get that many gamers have no sympathy for another dead live service, but jeez, Wildfire weren't even given a real chance to succeed. Geoff Keighley exposing the game only added fuel to the fire.