Imagine bitching about pineapple on pizza when those gastroterrorists are unironically putting ketchup on sausages. It’s sacrilege, an atrocity against man and god.

Marketing is extremely important for a game’s launch because it’s the only opportunity for a game to make a first impression and set expectations, and to gain player goodwill. When an announcement trailer is presented as the final spot on TGA, the audience expects a game worthy of that spot. Geoff did the game no favour by doing that, or by doubling down on twitter. They’ve cocked up the marketing and ruined player goodwill that may have caused some people to overlook the product’s multiple issues on release.

Coming back from that takes a lot of fucking effort (see: No Man’s Sky), which they’re obviously unwilling to give, so why would players waste their time for the promise of a better game? Highguard is a failure of design, a failure of management, and a failure of marketing; and I’m not at all sad that it’s getting flushed down the drain.

It sucks that the first to feel the effects of this entirely predictable failure are the workers.

That would be true in a vacuum, but there have been plenty of examples of “good” games completely fizzling out simply because they were unremarkable in a saturated market. Lawbreakers was a fairly well-received objective-based team shooter with interesting movement mechanics. It was killed off because it couldn’t compete with Overwatch for players’ time. Then there are the countless battle royale games released during the reign of PUBG and Fortnite, and all the wannabe Halo-killers, CoD-killers, WoW-killers… history is littered with the corpses of “good” but otherwise unremarkable games that thought they were the shit.

Highguard isn’t just a failure of a game, it’s a failure on the studio’s part to learn the lesson: players’ time and attention are limited resources, and you need to be exceptional to compete in a saturated market.

They didn’t just make a bet. They made a bet on the horse with broken legs.

“We are absolutely cooked, chat.” - Alan Wake (writer)

You had the opportunity to find out. But the petulant single issue voters didn’t want imperfection, so they chose to not prevent Trump from getting put in the big chair. So, how has your choice contributed to stopping the genocide in Gaza?

(I know you don’t want to acknowledge the answer, and I’ve heard the usual deflections, so don’t even bother replying)

Not just idiots. They are complicit. They had a big button in front of them that said “Do Not Put A Nazi In The Big Chair”, but they didn’t push it because it was blue and not green, and now they have a nazi in the big chair.

Correction: use present perfect. You’re not witnessing it, you have witnessed it. The “Why didn’t the Germans do something about the nazis?” phase ended in November of 2024.

Something needs to fill the gaping hole left behind after Concord’s death.

Today they’d be chanting “Not My Jesus” while holding upside-down Bibles or something.

That line was stolen from Shakespeare too.

Realistically, is that a factor for a Microsoft-sized company, though? I’d be shocked if they only had a single layer of redundancy. Whatever they store is probably replicated between high-availability hosts and datacenters several times, to the point where losing an entire RAID array (or whatever media redundancy scheme they use) is just a small inconvenience.

This is not meant for human beings. A creature that needs over 140 TB of storage in a single device can definitely afford to run them in some distributed redundancy scheme with hot swaps and just shred failed units. We know they’re not worried about being wasteful.

“You are absolutely right, ma’am. I understand why my spilling your drink in your lap has caused you some distress, and I truly sympathize with your son’s concussion from the blunt impact caused by my reckless flailing to fix my previous mistake. Please listen to this advertisement while another attendant comes to assist you.”

Standing here, I’m standing here…

Ever heard of shotgun marriages?

Hide it in a poem in a leather bound book at the end of a trap-filled dungeon.

Hbomberguy sighs as he adds another 30 minutes of runtime to his next video.

Something about child processes, maybe?

The lesson should have been learned when Lawbreakers died: you can’t release a game that is just “good” into a saturated ecosystem and expect it to succeed. When a game has to compete with six others in the same genre, especially deeply enfranchised titles like Apex or Forkknife, it must be exceptional. Highguard falls well short of that. It’s the most average, design-by-committee, risk-averse, trend chasing, white bread, picket fence product I’ve played in a long time. It’s a glass of lukewarm tap water. It’s unsalted butter on toast. And that’s before Keighley and studio management fucked up its marketing.

If a game has to fail in order for some management type to finally engage that lump of tapioca pudding inside their cranium and let the game system designers create a better game, I won’t shed a tear for it. And if this is what the studio made up of alleged “industry veterans” can achieve, I won’t shed a tear for it either. We need better games, not more of them.

Isn’t that the Hillary Clinton wax statue that had to be turned into a pumpkin on short notice?