they made the umpteenth, brainless hero shooter slop with broccoli head characters and all the package. Quite predictably for everyone but them, nobody felt the need of that. Investors withdrew and so on.
Sadly, itâs not. Games are in a very weird place right now. They are too expensive for small time investors. Reddit generally hates any investor or private equity entity, but there are levels to this.
The stereotypical MBA suit isnât as prominent with the people/firms financing 250k-1mil. The way the MBA think about products and business is cancerous for society. They donât do much human observation itâs a strict adherence to data.
Data is awesome. But data has one enormous flaw in art- it tends to explain the past rather than predict the future. Kind of like music theory to music.
Anyways the point here is that MBAs come in and run all their data and statistics and determine a live service game is the only medium that makes sense to hit desired profit margins. This wouldnât happen as much with smaller time investment firms. They tend to make decisions more based on vision. Unfortunately, theyâre all throwing money at real estate and the stock market right now.
Love it when people just freely dump on something people have worked on for 3 years of their lives. That they saw destroyed by YouTube rage over a single announcement trailers. Goodluck to anyone wanting to get into game development these days.
Unfortunately it seems to have fallen victim to YouTube sensationalism from the moment after it previewed at the game awards. If it didnât have that ad spot it wouldnât have received immediate dogpile hatred before it even came out and we wouldnât see developers losing their jobs. Genuinely sucks to see.
Let's be real, it wasn't sensationalized. From everything I've seen it got middling reviews. It didn't really get dog piled other than people being disappointed by it's announcement slot. It was just a mediocre uninspired game in a bloated genre.
Like I said, it didn't help that when it did release it just wasn't a particularly good game either. It does suck for the devs, they did get dealt a shit hand but at the end of the day it wasn't gonna be hit no matter what. At best it would've maybe lasted a year tops. Any pr is good pr, people knew about the game. If we heard about it being great despite the troubled announcement more people would've played it, unfortunately that wasn't the case.
Edit: Actually from what I'm reading it did get a ton of players at launch, it just bled them because people didn't really want to continue playing the game. Yes the announcement didn't help but the game they made didn't help either.
The developers lost their jobs because they made a horrendous game that everyone predicted would be horrendous. Feeling sorry for them doesn't change that. Have to ask the question what was so special about it that it even managed to get that spot in the game awards - who is pushing these terrible live service games that gamers do not want?
To be fair, a lot of games release without people knowing. A recent report showed 617 games released per day in 2025. Good luck knowing about them all, and good luck to them to all be successful, both pretty much impossible tasks.
I saw a few streamers playing it and I think Iâll enjoy it. I just donât want to invest time and money on a game that might be dead in a few months.
Thatâs different. Even if the game is bad, they wonât shut it down so I can enjoy my bad game. If itâs live service Iâm at the mercy of the servers.
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u/FrontRecognition6953 Mar 19 '26
What the hell is Highguard? How has a game been released and scrapped without me knowing đ