Gaming: Rip Highguard: In A Better World, An Fps Is Allowed To Be Unpopular

Highguard was not a dead game, it's being murdered.

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Welcome to FOV 90, an FPS column from staff writer Morgan Park. Every other week, I cover topics relevant to first-person shooter enjoyers, spanning everything from multiplayer and singleplayer to the old and the new.

Wildlight Entertainment announced today that Highguard is shutting down on March 12. Servers will go offline just 45 days after they went online, cementing the 3v3 "raid shooter" as another live service boondoggle.

I won't relitigate the noxious cloud of internet that surrounded Highguard, because ultimately, premature "hate playing" is not the reason it's going away. Highguard is shutting down because live service games are not allowed to be unpopular.

It's important to establish that Highguard had fans. Thousands of people were playing it—its regular concurrents hung around 400 on Steam and at least double that on PS5, according to game director Chad Grenier. Remember, peak concurrents are not a measure of how many total people played a game that day—that number is usually much higher but never public.

For a brand new studio making its first game, I'd say that's pretty good. Highguard wasn't popular, but neither are dozens of multiplayer shooters that've stuck around for years. This pattern of games shutting down just days, weeks, or months after they debut is still a very recent, ugly phenomenon. It's one thing to stop actively developing an FPS with a small audience and move on to greener pastures. It's another to throw it away like it was trash.

To treat this like it's normal is to let the morons who make these calls off the hook. In this case, Tencent was reportedly Wildlight's big backer that immediately cut off funding when it wasn't a hit. It should be galactically embarrassing for these suits to display such a dearth of belief or awareness in what they were helping create.

At what point did these moneymen really think they were funding the next Apex Legends? Did they not hear the same pitch I did from Wildlight in January? It's an FPS centered around Capture the Flag that morphs into Rainbow Six lite every five minutes. It has "cool, but obviously niche" written all over it.

It's on Wildlight, too. Not the frontline developers who made a well-constructed FPS that, despite its complexity, played great—but the leadership that built a 100+-person team on terms that had Highguar

Source: PC Gamer