Highguard, the live-service shooter that debuted at The Game Awards, is going to shut down permanently this month.
“Despite the passion and hard work of our team, we have not been able to build a sustainable player base to support the game long term,” said the developers in a message posted to their social media pages.
The game launched to a strong Steam player count of over 100k concurrent players plus all those across console, but despite being free-to-play the numbers began to drop fast. Layoffs were announced at the team, but people hoped these were the regular kind of layoffs that often occur after a project is completed. Now, though, we know different.
The game will officially close its doors on March 12, a mere 46 days after it launched. This means it did last longer than Concord, the multi-million dollar disaster from Sony that crashed and burned so brightly that aliens on another planet had to put on sunglasses.
One last update will launch for the game today or tomorrow which will add a whole new playable character, right before you can’t play it anymore.
The game has had a weird time of it. Geoff Keighley liked it so much that he asked to use it as the last game to be shown at The Game Awards, a stark contrast to how the developer originally planned on shadow-dropping it. That gave it a massive audience, but unfortunately people were not happy with the reveal. Still, it helped it drawn in some good opening numbers. Clearly, though people were not interested in sticking around. There was a bit of an online trend toward hating it, something we are seeing with…well, everything these days. But even without that, it’s obvious that Highguard was probably never going to survive in this cutthroat market.
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