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.
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?!
Nothing to salvage from that mess of a live-service slop.
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.
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.
It’s insane that this isn’t a requirement for shutting down/delisting a game.
Whose requirement? Government game laws? Just don’t play this garbage.
Yes.
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.
I expect whoever made the decision is embarrassed and don’t want a visible monument to their hubris.
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.
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.
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.
build…a player base? should it be expected on day 1? idk
Marathon next? Place your bets ladies and gentlemen!
Marathon is probably life or death for Bungie. Sony can’t exactly afford to put out a mid game after spending so much on the studio… and “mid” is exactly what Marathon felt like. Just like so many copycats during the battle royale boom.
I don’t think it will fail (or if it does, not as hard as Highguard), but unless it manages to stand out from the Tarkov/Arc Raiders/Hunt: Showdown oligopoly, it won’t bring in the numbers to please Sony.
To be honest at this point toppling Embark Studios is pretty tough in my book. The games they make have the same feeling of passion that Bungie used to have. Great gun play, fantastic audio design and interesting ideas. I really hope for the best for Marathon, if for no other reason than competition drives creativity, but Bungie has had the soul sucked out of them unfortunately.
Idk I played the play test and it was easily one of the better extraction shooters. Bungie has gun play locked in. But they shot themselves in the foot with BattlEye linux support and my new linux build is literally being put together this week. So regardless, I won’t be buying it when it launches cause it wont run on linux.
post build specs please
Case: O11 Compact Board: MSI 870e Edge TI Wifi
CPU: Ryzen 9 9950 x3D
GPU: XFX RX 9070 xt
PSU: Lian Li EG1000G
Cooler: Lian Li Hydroshift 2 LCDIt took me over a year to get it all together and all of the expensive components were gifts
What’s your RAM situation looking like?
32 gbs. Caught at the first sign of upturn on the RAM crisis.
Edit: 32 DDR5
I heard the most recent playtest brought some hype back. Did you play it?
Not a lot, just enough to get the feel of the game, but also to realize that I’m not the target audience. In some ways, it’s similar to Counter-Strike 1.6 or Team Fortress 2 back in high school: if I have a group of friends and an hour of free time, then sure, I might hop on. But I won’t be investing the time and long-term effort that an extraction shooter expects of me.
The moment to moment experience is good. Bungie haven’t forgotten how to create a tight FPS experience. But the game needs both longevity and a healthy playerbase, that’s what concerns me. Fans of hardcore extraction shooters already have Tarkov and Hunt, and casual players already have Arc Raiders. It takes something exceptional to move players out of their “home” game.
People who enjoy hardcore pvp and extraction shooters are hyped… but the important question is whether or not those people represent a large enough niche to sustain a game with such a massive budget.
I’m guessing no, but who knows.
Marathon seems pretty good imo, it’s problem is it’s trying to be a more hardcore extraction shooter than the ones that already exist which is gonna make it too niche to sustain a large US-based studio like Bungie.
Mid is exactly how I have seen Marathon described by the server slam feedback. People vasalating between whether or not they like it immediately after starting to play it is not a great look.
I was expecting mid/boring but quite enjoyed it. Not normally an extraction shooters player, though, so we’ll see how it fairs with the target audience.
DOA is my guess but they’ll probably prop it up for a month or so.
I’m not interested either way, but my money says it’ll do okay
Given how boring it is to watch others play it, I don’t think it will see any huge success. It will probably find a loyal fanbase, but probably not enough to sustain it long term.
If only because Bungie itself has a strangely loyal legacy fanbase. I don’t know how big it is at this point however.
Marathon is the complete opposite of ARC Raiders in the fact that it essentially forces/encourages you to fight. I give it like 2 months before all the casuals go back to ARC because of spawn rushers (they were already doing that during the server slam). And while Delta Force Operations kinda behaves similarly, they do have some ways to reign in the sweats by having multiple maps, multiple difficulties with gear caps, and a ton of other things that prevent bad players from getting farmed 24/7.
Lightning in a bottle, eh?
“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
I feel like Geoff really did a disservice to this game. It might actually could have ramped up some dedicated players as it built out its vision. But Geoff swooping in and saying it’ll be the next, greatest game did it zero favors.
2 million players gave the game a chance thanks to Geoff. I doubt the game would even get 1000 players if they decided to shadow drop it like they originally intended.
The fact that they laid off most of their staff just weeks after release shows that they couldn’t afford a slow ramp up.
I agree completely. There’s only one chance to make a first impression. The final ad slot of TGA needs a worthy game that the audience can be excited about, and putting the most generic, most corporate-looking game there felt like an insult. Kind of like this absolute flop.
Too be fair, TGA doesn’t seem to have historically given a lot of weight to the last spot. And they probably should, because of the public perception of the last spot being inherently prestigious. But it doesn’t seem like they were trying to say it’s some sort of capstone or anything. By all accounts he just thought it looked neat and threw it in the last open spot.
Idk if they had the time or money to quietly release it and ramp up over time, Tencent was likely asking where’s their return on investment after years of funding and live service games kind of depend entirely on launch success to springboard future development.
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.
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?
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.
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
These games are build with a budged so high they either have to rival overwatch in its glory days or they get scrapped and written off as a loss since they will never be profitable.
Triple A studios have arrived in the corporate world a while ago were long term profits are irrelevant if your quarterly earnings aren’t what the investors want.
Are games like this grifts?
Build hype, get whatever cash you can, and then shut them down?
It didn‘t sell so no, it‘s not simply a grift. It’s just that nobody wanted it.
Kind of.
More like throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.
That’s just the marketing cycle.
Is marketing a grift? I mean, kinda. But you’ll get marketing on good games and bad alike.
Nobody seemed to mind the endless marketing for Expedition 33 or Eldin Ring or Stardew Valley or Minecraft.
I don’t see how this would be a grift. Tencent’s funding seems to have been contingent on some kind of metric, and they pulled out because Highguard fell short.
From some interviews, it sounds like it was just an ambitious mess that didn’t have good testers. IIRC, they said something about everyone pitching 5 ideas every day, and added a couple each time. And it really shows, it is some kind of franken-monster that combines all kinds of ideas that make a patchwork of meh. And then the testers they had either all worked on the game, or were friends with those that did, and nobody wanted to be a downer so they always gave positive feedback.
No, it’s a flop.
It’s hard to believe that a company would spend hundreds of millions to develop a game, only for it to flop. But, that’s how it works with live-service PVP only games. They depend on network effects. People want to play what their friends are playing. If a company gets this right they can be like Minecraft or Fortnite and it’s the game everyone plays, bringing in billions of dollars. If they miss, it can be a complete flop that nobody plays.
Google says they started development in 2022. I’m guessing Overwatch 2 going FTP in January of that year made it seem like the genre was growing instead of trending sideways.
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
Glad this slop failed. Make better games.
I must have been under a rock. This is my fist time hearing about this game. I guess I have a week to check it out and hopefully not like it.
It’s a PvP hero shooter + siege + looter + capture the flag + demolition all in one game, if that’s your alley.
And it got the best announcement spot at the GOTY awards show, which is wild.
- adds account level progression and skill trees
- game shuts down forever in a week
🤦
