Highguard Situation

Today's such a special day, even dusted off the bucket hat for it. It's Highguard release day. I imagine you probably already called in sick for work in order to take as much time as possible to enjoy this game that everyone in the world had been salivating for since it was revealed at the very end of the Game Awards. Since then, it's been quite a question mark with Highguard because they got the prime spot in the Game Awards out of nowhere. a game no one was expecting and a genre most people weren't exactly super excited for these days. Most people perceived it to be a hero shooter, myself included, cuz in the footage they showed it looked like it was some type of hero shooter most often compared to like Concord. It wasn't a great trailer and the position that it was placed in at the Game Awards made things even worse. They also then went radio silent for over a month up until like a day or two ago where they finally broke the silence saying that the game is still coming out as advertised and then finally started, you know, speaking up about it. The game came out today and it's very clear that this is not a Concord level failure or anything. It had an all-time peak of just under 100,000 players, which Concord couldn't have even imagined in their wildest dreams. That game didn't even get to like a thousand and it died in 2 weeks. It barely lasted longer than a poop left in a gas station toilet. So, this blew it out of the water in terms of player count. And I think a lot a large part of that success is because the game is free to play, whereas Concord was a $40 payw wall. Even people that weren't exactly hyped about Highguard, they were at least willing to give it a spin, at least give it a chance kind of. There were some people that literally logged into the game and said, "This is the biggest pile of dog [ __ ] ever. Zero out of 10. Throw it in the trash bin without ever even like playing a match or maybe they did the training and then just said, "Nope, this is terrible. I quit. I spit on this garbage." Which whatever. I'm not your [ __ ] dad. If if that's how you want to interact with games, all power to you, man. Pretty much the second this puppy popped out of the oven here, people flocked to Steam to leave scathing reviews on it and post their like jokes and memes about how [ __ ] trash it is without ever even loading into a single match. Right now, it's sitting at mostly negative. And of course, not all of that is from people just looking to dunk on it because of the whole Game Awards fiasco.