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.
Which one was that? The horses one?
Lightning in a bottle, eh?
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.
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?
It is working for overwatch, why is it not working for me? I want to be like cs2.
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.
Except the studio behind Dave the diver is very vocal about not being indi - it’s just the graphics so everyone assumes it
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.
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.
“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!
No! Square Enix please don’t jump on another game trend your weird NFT mobile slop games have already done irreparable damage to your image! (also pls invest more budget in FFXIV)
/slightly joking idrc what SE does
“Why aren’t people dumping thousands of hours into our video game while the economy is in the toilet?”
Who could’ve seen this coming?
Yet another live service game shooting for the moon and not even lasting a month.
If it’s unsustainable for you, release the server and game source code for someone else to host it and patch it. Why waste developers’ time and effort into making of this game?!
I expect whoever made the decision is embarrassed and don’t want a visible monument to their hubris.
I’m convinced it is some sort of insurance fraud a la The Producers. They found a way to make more money by flopping HARD than getting middling success, and flopping hard is a LOT LESS work. If their choice is A) spend a lot of money and time making a really good game that will capture the attention of the entire market; or B) spend a bit of money and time making something that looks convincingly like a real attempt at making a good game to some corpo-fuckwits at an insurance company and then nuke it hours after release… Well. Yea, they’ll do the second one.
From how I understand it, TenCent pulled funding in the studio as soon as the game didn’t hit its metric goals, they fired all but 11 people working on the game last month. If they have time to Port it, that would be awesome to make it open source, but I have a feeling the skeleton crew left probably doesn’t have the ability.
It’s insane that this isn’t a requirement for shutting down/delisting a game.
That’s literally what the “stop killing games” movement was/is pushing for, at least in Europe. Really hope it goes somewhere, but it’s kind of stopped making noise lately (at least that I’m hearing), what with the US speed-running fascism more and more every single week.
SKG (archived on their own YT channel not Ross) did a press conference recently and various politicals were there siding with the movement. It’s still slow but ongoing progress.
That’s good to hear.
As I knew it, it was about releasing binaries/selfhostability not source code.
Ah, good point, it didn’t require source code release so much as self-hostability in some form.
Whose requirement? Government game laws? Just don’t play this garbage.
Yes.
Nothing to salvage from that mess of a live-service slop.
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.
What’s Highguard?
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.
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…
You think the responsible will be made responsible? No they will receive parachutes and bonuses as they swap to the next shorting mafia target
God am I sick of all this games as a service season pass loot box shit.
Well apparently it didn’t pay out for them, so you aren’t the only one
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.
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.
“Player feedback” is part of what makes most live services shit.
I don’t want reddit designing my game.
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:
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.
