Highguard - Concord 2.0?

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Tanner Glass said:
Sadly there's a large segment of the population that does - there's a gigantic market for <Popular Game> but <Different> and some of those games print money to this day.

There's no Valorant without Counter-Strike, no League without DOTA, no Marvel Rivals/Overwatch without TF2, and so on. It's a formula that works so companies are always going to chase it.
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I forget who said it, but they stated there's only room for 2 top games in a multiplayer genre. The Big One, the main competitor, and then everyone else. First mover usually has the advantage, first competitor gets to learn from their mistakes and sometimes takes over. But 3rd place and below is the death spot, you can maybe sustain a game in 3rd but it'll never achieve blockbuster status.

If you want to be the Big One, you either need to create a new genre yourself, or copy the current Big One in a field with no competitors. That's fine, many games do that. But you can not create a game that is only financially viable if it is one of the top 2. That's a recipe for failure. You can't invest in a genre aiming for 3rd place. The only games that thrive there tend to be smaller, organic creations that get bigger than the original scope.

Highguard dumped money and time into a mature, oversaturated, already-settled genre. Even if they managed to hit 3rd and stay there, it wasn't going to be viable. The big profits and playerbase had already been taken.
 
The real question is if they're going to allow people to keep the game and run localhost matches or not.
The answer is they won't, but I'm still finding myself thinking about how retarded it is to just delete these kind of games from existence, entirely. I'm sure there's some fan out there that's autistic enough to make their own changes and updates and revive enough of a niche underground scene that the game will still have a handful of fans for years to come, but only if they're willing to let people have the game after the servers are gone.
 
Harvey Danger said:
I forget who said it, but they stated there's only room for 2 top games in a multiplayer genre. The Big One, the main competitor, and then everyone else. First mover usually has the advantage, first competitor gets to learn from their mistakes and sometimes takes over. But 3rd place and below is the death spot, you can maybe sustain a game in 3rd but it'll never achieve blockbuster status.

If you want to be the Big One, you either need to create a new genre yourself, or copy the current Big One in a field with no competitors. That's fine, many games do that. But you can not create a game that is only financially viable if it is one of the top 2. That's a recipe for failure. You can't invest in a genre aiming for 3rd place. The only games that thrive there tend to be smaller, organic creations that get bigger than the original scope.

Highguard dumped money and time into a mature, oversaturated, already-settled genre. Even if they managed to hit 3rd and stay there, it wasn't going to be viable. The big profits and playerbase had already been taken.
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I think this speaks more to the unoriginality and sheer lack of talent by modern devs than any universal rule.

For example when WoW came out, there was Asheron's Call, Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, and a whole host of others that were perfectly profitable. WoW became the big one solely by brand name alone. It was fun *enough.* People wanted in on the hype train.

The fact these losers can't even turn a profit let alone break even shows just how entitled, worthless and bloated they've become. 500 wokes over 7 years doing what 50 men used to do in 3 and still failing? Give me a break.
 
Harvey Danger said:
I forget who said it, but they stated there's only room for 2 top games in a multiplayer genre. The Big One, the main competitor, and then everyone else. First mover usually has the advantage, first competitor gets to learn from their mistakes and sometimes takes over. But 3rd place and below is the death spot, you can maybe sustain a game in 3rd but it'll never achieve blockbuster status.

If you want to be the Big One, you either need to create a new genre yourself, or copy the current Big One in a field with no competitors. That's fine, many games do that. But you can not create a game that is only financially viable if it is one of the top 2. That's a recipe for failure. You can't invest in a genre aiming for 3rd place. The only games that thrive there tend to be smaller, organic creations that get bigger than the original scope.
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You can also come in later with just a more refined version of The Big One (or with better IP) because no game truly lasts forever, which you see with Marvel Rivals, Overwatch, and TF2.

What you need more than anything is someone who is passionate about and truly understands the genre to really find what can be changed to really improve it (and thereby, make it the New Big One) but highguard very clearly did not have that. The way the game launched was unbelievably bad.

A PVP game with huge downtime/setup between phases is boring to PVP players, a resource/base game with constant forced PVP is unfun for resource/base players, a team based shooter with near 0 team based mechanics on a huge map is boring to team players. Even in Playtest 1 - the fact that not a single person said "Who is this for?" and they just went into production for so long without ever asking is insane.
 
Fat Camp Intern said:
For example when WoW came out, there was Asheron's Call, Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, and a whole host of others that were perfectly profitable. WoW became the big one solely by brand name alone. It was fun *enough.* People wanted in on the hype train.
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Yeah, but genres matured since then. There's hundreds of MMOs right now, many of them sustainable, but without looking them up you probably couldn't name the top 10. If you looked at a graph of player count, you'd see the parabolic falloff right around #3.

(I actually looked into this recently, and you could launch a barebones MMO with a 1-2 person team right now, funded with just your credit card. The barrier to entry became dirt low, but so did the odds of wild success.)

The "2-3 big ones" observation was meant more for the modern market, not back when sub-genres were being invented every year.
 
Harvey Danger said:
There's hundreds of MMOs right now, many of them sustainable, but without looking them up you probably couldn't name the top 10
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I'm willing to bet the top 10 are, generally, older games, though. WoW is still profitable, for example. People still play EverQuest. Elder Scrolls Online is new, relatively speaking, by comparison and it's still massively profitable with a large playerbase across 3 different platforms (and I don't think they've worked out cross play yet, even).
New MMOs, however, tend to have an influx of players that want to be at the top of the culture of the game, get burnt out by nothing to do, then move on to the next new MMO where they can then try to be at the top of the game's culture, again, repeat ad nauseum.
 
LOL

If i was bungie i would be pretty worried right about now. Has a single game of this kind, no matter how good or bland, actually survived even a short time in the last few years?

Also awesome seeing that CCP money dry up from the medium, let it be the beginning of not just non-chinese media but business and society as a whole.

Death to low effort pvp, esp shooter, slop!
 
Tanner Glass said:
Even in Playtest 1 - the fact that not a single person said "Who is this for?" and they just went into production for so long without ever asking is insane.
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Because they weren't looking at that, they were looking at Data Points and metrics. Which is one of the main reasons Highguard felt, looked, and played so goddamn weird.
  • "Ah Hero Shooters are popular!" - We have Wardens (tm) who are part of the Iron Vigil (tm) which is kind of like Overwatch.
  • "Base Building is big!" - Cool, here's base building elements, because Rainbow Six Siege (or whatever the fuck it's called now) has elements similar to it with the reinforcements, but we can also have a bit of Fortnite in there.
  • "Resource Gathering and The Shop!" - You mean inspired from Popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas League of Legends and DOTA which is kind of like Creep Farming, but you know, without Creeps! So it's better!
And so on and so on. The problem is all of these Data Points are from 10 years ago and no one bothered to actually learn why they are important or how they've changed so dramatically. I think we'll see more games doing that, hence why Marathon is so divisive right now, it's an Extraction Shooter when the Single Player boom is happening in market, so people are just feeling the malaise behind it. Especially when you consider that it probably "Started" fullswing development around the time Halo Infinite was enjoying its grace period and Destiny 2 was at its peak. Bungie still thought the name alone would carry it to success, both their own and Marathons.
 
Fat Camp Intern said:
I think this speaks more to the unoriginality and sheer lack of talent by modern devs than any universal rule.
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This is exactly right. Like the MMO's you listed, yes they were in competition with each other as they are the same genre of game, but they offered vastly different experiences from each other via their mechanics/art style/story/etc. They were competitors, but not substitutes. Many of these new releases are just trying to follow the same formula as the existing big dogs but fail to offer anything to set them apart and they can't even be bothered to make it look good. Its all just imitative slop.
 
Harvey Danger said:
I forget who said it, but they stated there's only room for 2 top games in a multiplayer genre. The Big One, the main competitor, and then everyone else. First mover usually has the advantage, first competitor gets to learn from their mistakes and sometimes takes over. But 3rd place and below is the death spot, you can maybe sustain a game in 3rd but it'll never achieve blockbuster status.

If you want to be the Big One, you either need to create a new genre yourself, or copy the current Big One in a field with no competitors. That's fine, many games do that. But you can not create a game that is only financially viable if it is one of the top 2. That's a recipe for failure. You can't invest in a genre aiming for 3rd place. The only games that thrive there tend to be smaller, organic creations that get bigger than the original scope.

Highguard dumped money and time into a mature, oversaturated, already-settled genre. Even if they managed to hit 3rd and stay there, it wasn't going to be viable. The big profits and playerbase had already been taken.
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I think the saying goes in most markets there are three slots, the first one, the best one, and the cheapest one. Highguard was none of them.
 
Harvey Danger said:
If you want to be the Big One, you either need to create a new genre yourself, or copy the current Big One in a field with no competitors. That's fine, many games do that. But you can not create a game that is only financially viable if it is one of the top 2. That's a recipe for failure. You can't invest in a genre aiming for 3rd place. The only games that thrive there tend to be smaller, organic creations that get bigger than the original scope.
Click to expand...
And don't forget, Marvel Rivals took advantage of Overwatch stumbling with the Overwatch 2 controversy. If it hadn't been for that, I think it flops as well. I genuinely have no idea what Highguard or any of these other hero shooters are thinking trying to corner a market that is already being dominated by several giants which haven't really been making mistakes as of late. It was ALWAYS gonna end this way.
 
3 little thoughts i had

1. They hyped it up with "the developers of apex" but what I don't think people realize is Apex would've flopped hard if it came out today. It's not a particularly good game, just a huge case of right place right time. When it came out there was the huge market niche that was empty since BR was popular but of the other 2 options PUBG was a buggy mess and Fortnite had horrible movement and gunplay (at the time)

2. The base raiding shit is all that's really distinct about highguard, so I think it's kind of funny how 1 guy could've built that gamemode in an existing shooter like Fortnite custom games or even roblox in like a month and would've realized all the issues with the format without having to invest close to (over?) 9 figures in it.

3. I wonder what happens to the highguard IP and assets now. It's not like Concord where the studio was directly owned by Sony who could quietly absorb it into a shadow archive. Is there a possibility of a great Highguard auction or Highguard Open Source? I doubt it, but it'd sure be entertaining
 
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