You know a fad genre is well and truly dead when Forbes is reporting on it
Was this ever a real genre beyond publishers forcing it?
Hero shooters? Yeah. TF2, Overwatch, and APEX legends are all very popular. The problem is that there isn’t a lot of room for new games to come on the scene because of how hard these games are to make and balance, and how deeply invested people are in their games of choice. People still play TF2 despite the fact that it’s nearly 20 years old and hasn’t had major content updates in a long time. Overwatch is 10 years old and is still getting updates, and APEX legends is nearly as old.
Readers Digest “joke” section next
Because no one wants to play them? Much less pay money to support them?
Also nobody trusts them. Why spend money on Highguard when there is no guarantee the game will still exist next year? They already layed off some important people.
If Highguard targeted low end hardware, included mod support and bundled in the server so that players can host and moderate their matches themselves and had no monetization beyond the initial price tag people would be all over it. But for some reason nobody does that anymore.
You can still play Quake III today, if it was doable then it’s more than doable now. But multiplayer game devs seemingly left behind that player first approach for good.
Q3 also doesn’t have kernel level anticheat.
Also, live-service games endeavour to stay relevant forever.
For, say, God of War, you’ll eventually be done with it. You’ve played all the things, you put the box on the shelve and move on to another game. But for these forever-games, you can play them forever.
And that means that if you want to launch a game in that market, you can’t rely on getting players who just put down God of War and want something roughly similar. You need to not only be better than Fortnite, but you need to be sufficiently better than people will abandon years of investement into Fortnite to go play your game.
The barrier to entry is HUGE, and it’s made much worse by the idea that the new game might dissapear, meaning you wasted months (or, occasionally, days, lol).
True, if multiplayer shooter developers want to be takes seriously they have to move away from the games as a service model. Quake III wasn’t some forever game, it was complete product. If the players wanted more they had to make mods, it wasn’t Id’s problem.
There will always be less demand for multiplayer games since they are supposed to be played indefinitely, but deliveservicification of multiplayer FPS will allow for niche games with small but dedicated playerbases and restore game ownership to the multiplayer community.
Highguard is free to play and nobody is complaining that it turns into pay to win.
It’s just not a good game and the trailer did nothing to set it apart. There are lots if good breakdowns but it all comes down to that it’s just not good.
It started off with almost 100K concurrent players and then dropped to 37K in 24 hours. It’s been sitting at just 2K since.
I can’t imagine people would be “all over” highguard even if it had mod and server support.
They would be, by the virtue of the fact no other modern multiplayer shooter works like that. Who cares if the stock heroes are lame and game modes are lacking? You can just mod in better ones! (It would be very nice if devs shipped the game with cool heroes and tons of modes in the first place, but, at least you have the option.)
Dont forget player time is a limited resource all those online games are competing for. Everyone can only maintain so many daily goals and battle passes - even more so, if it requires coordinating with friends to play together.
Because nobody has the time to play another online only game when they are already loyal or addicted to the bigger games with a higher budget for predatory marketing research?
