Welcome to Highguard… paid attention isn’t a community. In a power-law shooter market, you’re not competing with launches, you’re competing with habits, time, money, and friends. I map the Steam curve, the Twitch spike, the press rehab tour, and the creator clip economy, then land on the simple lesson, if you want to break into the castle, you have to invite players in early.
I still see a possibility for Highguard to survive in the market, and that is that, somehow, the developers keep the game going for a few more months, commit to their roadmap, and hope that, if the game is fun, it slowly builds community.
There's been games that started off dead and then somehow revived, not to the levels of Marvel Rivals, but decent enough to be a game worth keeping up. All it takes is a few viral clips online for people to say "hey, this actually looks fun".
Although to be fair, I have seen some gameplay and it does not look particularly fun or special to me.
Agree it could happen.. it’s just very unlikely to happen…. Net / net if they can make it depends on the cost structure of the game to keep it running and the burn rate of their operations.
My worry there is they spent a lot of money.. out the gate to get some heavy hitters to play their game (shroud, lirik, summit1g and more of Loaded’s roster) and to survive as a F2P shooter you need a pretty big audience or.. be backed by a huge org that can burn money.
With Marathon on the horizon too…. They do not have much time.
Thanks for the read and comment! I drop my newsletter weekly if you are interested in more content like this!
I still see a possibility for Highguard to survive in the market, and that is that, somehow, the developers keep the game going for a few more months, commit to their roadmap, and hope that, if the game is fun, it slowly builds community.
There's been games that started off dead and then somehow revived, not to the levels of Marvel Rivals, but decent enough to be a game worth keeping up. All it takes is a few viral clips online for people to say "hey, this actually looks fun".
Although to be fair, I have seen some gameplay and it does not look particularly fun or special to me.
Agree it could happen.. it’s just very unlikely to happen…. Net / net if they can make it depends on the cost structure of the game to keep it running and the burn rate of their operations.
My worry there is they spent a lot of money.. out the gate to get some heavy hitters to play their game (shroud, lirik, summit1g and more of Loaded’s roster) and to survive as a F2P shooter you need a pretty big audience or.. be backed by a huge org that can burn money.
With Marathon on the horizon too…. They do not have much time.
Thanks for the read and comment! I drop my newsletter weekly if you are interested in more content like this!