Highguard - Concord 2.0?

[LiquidKid]

And that's where their marketing budget went just like Concord and Unknown 9.
View attachment 8524211
I'm sure someone thinks it was worth it.

and that’s prime time for the US. Guess timezones really don’t save the game after all lol

It worked with Overwatch about a decade ago, and Fortnite (even if it isn't a "Hero" shooter.) To this day, Overwatch is still the most successful live service Hero Shooter, even with the incredibly destruction bullshit like the sex abuse allegations and the completely failed "Overwatch 2" rebrand.

The thinking doesn't come from looking at the many failures, but the fruits of the few successes. If you can make one of this Omni Games that people play forever and buy micro-transactions for until the sun explodes, you company will be printing money for generations. GTA V, Minecraft, Fortnite, Hell, even World of Warcraft -- there was a time when multiple studios were making their own MMOs that failed.

The AAA industry's getting big, more competitive and, it seems, less successful. We might see a time where there are less than ten "AAA" studios that even exist anymore.

This is you misunderstanding the games.
For starters, overwatch was the first new IP from blizzard in almost 20 years when it came out, blizzard at the time was considered one of the best studios of all time and had no major controversies yet even after the activision buy out. It also had a massive marketing push with extremely high quality cinematics that premiered in movie theatres. Overwatch was bound to be a hit at launch just due to all the pieces in place, and at the time the hero shooter genre was mostly dead. TF2 was still kicking but battlefield heroes has failed.

It also had the benefit of an intent enemy, are you team overwatch or team battleborn? This created a tribalism that helped push the game further. Then of course you have the porn scene which did a TON of free advertising for the game.

Fortnite started as a zombie tower defense game that was meant to mix Minecraft style base crafting with gunplay in an online world. But it quickly found success when it borrowed from Pubg and became the most polished battle royale game at the time(and still today.) but because it had a bunch of viral dances and a cartoony art style, ans was free it was a very very attractive game to kids, which is why Fortnite blew up. Then Epic, who basically always has free money due to unreal engine, could leverage their money and ties to studios all over for the collabs which further made the game successful.

Fortnite and Overwatch were not gambles. Both games had massive budgets, big marketing pushes, obvious niches to fill, emerged at times when their genre was smaller and unsaturated, and both came from studios with huge legacies going back decades.

Concord, and Highguard have none of that,

 

[MA5B]

If it doesn’t cross 10k this weekend I’m calling it, game’s shut down by the end of the month. Maybe as soon as the end of next week.

 

[p1138]

If it doesn’t cross 10k this weekend I’m calling it, game’s shut down by the end of the month. Maybe as soon as the end of next week.

I'll be honest, it probably won't be that quick because they don't have a publisher behind them ready to yank the plug to prevent the losses from going any further. Odds are they've still got a bunch of investor money leftover that can leave the company operating for months.

Look at MIndseye, same shit. "Indie" studio(even if they went through a publisher), got a bunch of money from investors, obviously a dead game and yet they're still spending money that they certainly didn't make as sales revenue, to try and patch it to be... something. This shit could go on for 6 months before layoffs start happening when the money begins to run out. Fuck, Wildgate that failed space pvp hero shooter thing from last year is still going, got a patch in December and it struggles to get a player count above 40 at peak, laughably the other day had a dip down to 4 players even with a 78% steam rating with thousands of reviews. But because they too probably got investor money to burn, they can leave the lights on with a skeleton crew. It's not as if the upper management at the company still collecting paychecks from the dwindling accounts have any reason to shut it down early.

 

[Rungle]

The game feels AI generated.
To say its concord 2.0 is a big overstatement though.
Its just very fucking bland.

 

[sodaboard]

And to this day, we still have absolutely no idea how this connects to the arena shooter aspect. At least TF2 had an autistic amount of lore and backstories for what's essentially the same genre

tf2 also started as "just a bunch of retards fighting in the desert" with zero regards for plot and they built a story around that. highguard seems to have an entire story planned that they're dripfeeding you but none of it looks interesting, just random shit thrown together

 

[volatile puar]

It worked with Overwatch about a decade ago, and Fortnite (even if it isn't a "Hero" shooter.) To this day, Overwatch is still the most successful live service Hero Shooter, even with the incredibly destruction bullshit like the sex abuse allegations and the completely failed "Overwatch 2" rebrand.

Every product has a chance to succeed as long as it has a sufficiently high quality to meet market demands. Walmart Brand sandwich cookies are worse than Oreos, but they taste good enough at a low enough price for people to buy them looking for "Cheap Oreos". This is the mobile gaming market strategy, sure, Clash of Clans sucks ass, but it's free and readily available to everyone in the west, so people signed up to play it and now they have an irrational attachment to the game so they don't stop. To bring it back to the cookie analogy, cookie structure is very important. If you're selling Cheap Oreos you'd better make sure the assembly line doesn't have a cookie mashing machine to ruin the product. Shovelware is the Cheap Oreos of the video game world but made at the factory with the cookie mashing machine. Everyone can see The Lord of Ring Gollum is shit so nobody expected it to do well, the only hope shovelware has is to trick enough people to buy the game so it recoups its shoestring budget.
Now, video games are a mass market artistic product and therefore their entire market value is their entertainment value. For something like movies, entertainment value has very little to do with the quality of the product, WB hired funny Avengers movie man to make Justice League, so they could have reasonably expected people to like it, after all his other movies were shit, too, but people liked them. However, video games are toys, their merit is mostly in their entertainment value, so they really should have known that Highguard would never succeed. The problem is twofold: the average investor has no idea what people like about video games, and they treat them like movies. For the first one, the investors see the trademark UE5 visuals and see that it looks triple A, so it must be quality. For the second, they think it will work as long as the characters are wacky like those Avengers people and if it has "a unique spin" on the gameplay of some popular game to pique interest.
They should have realized a long time ago that people are tired of "quirky" characters and marvel writing, but Infinity War made the most money, so it will take them a long time. They should have realized a long time ago that people do not like character designs simply as if they were "single issue voters". Having "a white character and a man" is not sufficient for the primarily white male audience of "first screen" gaming, you need to have a normal white dude, and if you have a character focused multiplayer game, you need to have several white dudes with different characteristics (or at least a lot of conventionally attractive women for them to look at like Overwatch). Of course, white dudes will still like non-white characters as long as they don't feel forced out, but you need the white dudes for that. Also, you can't make your characters intentionally ugly.
That being said, Highguard managed to grab onto some players through marketing efforts, and some of them will continue to play until they can't, since it's just a "third screen" game for them to do something with their hands while they listen to a podcast and play Mobile Gacha Waifu Gambling ULTRA.

 

[Smithfield Ham]

This is you misunderstanding the games.

I'm not misunderstanding them. I'm telling you how executives in gaming see them. All that context is missed. All they see is "Successful game! Proven formula! Want make money like them!"

 

[MA5B]

I'll be honest, it probably won't be that quick because they don't have a publisher behind them ready to yank the plug to prevent the losses from going any further. Odds are they've still got a bunch of investor money leftover that can leave the company operating for months.

Look at MIndseye, same shit. "Indie" studio(even if they went through a publisher), got a bunch of money from investors, obviously a dead game and yet they're still spending money that they certainly didn't make as sales revenue, to try and patch it to be... something. This shit could go on for 6 months before layoffs start happening when the money begins to run out. Fuck, Wildgate that failed space pvp hero shooter thing from last year is still going, got a patch in December and it struggles to get a player count above 40 at peak, laughably the other day had a dip down to 4 players even with a 78% steam rating with thousands of reviews. But because they too probably got investor money to burn, they can leave the lights on with a skeleton crew. It's not as if the upper management at the company still collecting paychecks from the dwindling accounts have any reason to shut it down early.

I get what you're saying but in this case I think it's more likely they shut it down with the promise of a relaunch in the summer or something once they 'improve' the game. Will it work? Almost certainly not.

 

[Battlefield42]

Tried it during the launch week. Tutorial filtered me but not in the game journo way. Tutorial is so fucking boring and treats you like a toddler. You have to finish it to play. I then decided to play Greedfall instead, has an actually interesting world despite being unreal engine slop.

 

[Battlefield42]

tf2 also started as "just a bunch of retards fighting in the desert" with zero regards for plot and they built a story around that. highguard seems to have an entire story planned that they're dripfeeding you but none of it looks interesting, just random shit thrown together

At least TF2 was cohesive in terms of art.

 

[Gorkzillah]

bros did you see "Concord 4" lol when will these californianians learn... since Highguard is concord 2 or 3 (if Marathon is 2 or 3)

 

[p1138]

bros did you see "Concord 4" lol when will these californianians learn... since Highguard is concord 2 or 3 (if Marathon is 2 or 3)

What mess is supposed to be Concord 4?

 

[Jace on ice]

What mess is supposed to be Concord 4?

That Horizon Zero Dawn hero shooter spinoff that just got revealed I think.

It has probably the ugliest character designs since Concord.

 

[Snake of Diamond]

The game feels AI generated.
To say its concord 2.0 is a big overstatement though.
Its just very fucking bland.

It's about what you expect when you have the same kinds of copy and paste people in these studios they tend to make the same games over and over and over again even if they work in completely different areas.

 

[p1138]

That Horizon Zero Dawn hero shooter spinoff that just got revealed I think.

It has probably the ugliest character designs since Concord.

Christ, it looks like a downs syndrome version of fortnite and monster hunter.

The problem is that it won't be a concord 4.0, and highguard isn't a concord 2.0. It'll likely just die a slow miserable death as one of hundreds of other mediocre games from the past few years. Concord was a once in a multi generation sort of failure, worse than ET for the Atari ever was. Just the fact that they're actually even marketing this horizon hunters shit means it likely won't suffer the same fate even if it deserves it for being such utter slop, but it's hardly a wannabe "billion dollar franchise".

 

[Snake of Diamond]

The game might lose a couple hundred million, it might not. I look at the trailer and all I see is visual clutter and assets that look like they came from the UE asset store. It's completely uninspired. You could have told me it was AI generated and I would have believed it.

Daul posting but It's the other worst thing to me. It's everything and nothing at the same time which i'd argue even an A.I would give you something more coherent and consistent. Highgaurd as someone pointed out is being everything and that is why it is failing because it has no confident identity of its own.

 

[The Last Stand]

I actually like the medieval magical FPS concept. It's certainly its most unique feature. But, the dwindling player base and repeating trends doesn't give confidence for its existence.

 

[moocow]

bros did you see "Concord 4" lol when will these californianians learn... since Highguard is concord 2 or 3 (if Marathon is 2 or 3)

What mess is supposed to be Concord 4?

I fucking love the fact that it has now become practically "standard procedure" in the gaming community to just name obvious impending failures after Concord and start numbering them. They don't even deserve proper names. They're just reduced to serial numbers as they should be.

 

[MA5B]

Alright it is over for real this time. Didn't hit 10k today and Friday night was the peak last weekend. Maybe it'll be a little higher tomorrow since there was an update last week on Friday which probably pushed it higher than it would've been otherwise but I doubt it'll pass 10k.

 

[Forgotten Beast]

As a complement to the post above, Highguard released "Episode 2" yesterday, with a new hero (a black man who looks indistinguishable from everybody else), a new map, a new cinematic on Youtube, a dozen or so new skins, and a Ranked mode (LMAO even):

[Patch Notes]
As the player graph shows, it has barely moved the needle. My crystal ball tells me that this weekend will be the last time this game is going to see 6k player peaks, unless they have the guts to release Episode 3 next Friday.
At this point, I wonder if they released Highguard as a barebones game on purpose with the intention of weekly patches "fixing it" to generate word of mouth and an artificial reputation of caring about the players, or if they are desperately cannibalizing whatever content they had set aside for the upcoming Battlepass seasons.