I genuinely wouldn‘t say so. The game shuts down because nobody played it anyway. The chances you pick up a game no one plays is pretty slim by nature. But even if you have been burned in the past you can just pick up one that is already popular.

Pre-ordering on the other hand is rarely a good idea and that goes for any game, not just live service.

All live service games will end eventually but a two month run is ridiculous, hahaha.

That's becoming my takeaway here as well. Don't jump into any live service game early, because it might get rug-pulled right as I'm getting into it.

Of course, if everyone took this approach then no live service game will ever take off, which kinda feels like where we are anyways.

Marathon is probably life or death for Bungie. Sony can't exactly afford to put out a mid game after spending so much on the studio... and "mid" is exactly what Marathon felt like. Just like so many copycats during the battle royale boom.

I don't think it will fail (or if it does, not as hard as Highguard), but unless it manages to stand out from the Tarkov/Arc Raiders/Hunt: Showdown oligopoly, it won't bring in the numbers to please Sony.

Marathon is the complete opposite of ARC Raiders in the fact that it essentially forces/encourages you to fight. I give it like 2 months before all the casuals go back to ARC because of spawn rushers (they were already doing that during the server slam). And while Delta Force Operations kinda behaves similarly, they do have some ways to reign in the sweats by having multiple maps, multiple difficulties with gear caps, and a ton of other things that prevent bad players from getting farmed 24/7.

DOA is my guess but they'll probably prop it up for a month or so.

It's insane that this isn't a requirement for shutting down/delisting a game.

I'm convinced it is some sort of insurance fraud a la The Producers. They found a way to make more money by flopping HARD than getting middling success, and flopping hard is a LOT LESS work. If their choice is A) spend a lot of money and time making a really good game that will capture the attention of the entire market; or B) spend a bit of money and time making something that looks convincingly like a real attempt at making a good game to some corpo-fuckwits at an insurance company and then nuke it hours after release... Well. Yea, they'll do the second one.

And yet Helldivers 2 comes out in 2024 and sets the world on fire. Seems to me that gaming is perfectly fine with live service as long as it's in line with community expectations and not s soulless cash grab.

And don't even get me started on gaming news and influencers, who seem like they love to hate. They bitch about being stuck with CoD, then shit on anything that could someday compete with it. It's baffling.

Nothing gets more "engagement" like that. It's not even isolated to games, any other section of news gets the same treatment. It's a shit show of journalism that we have today.

I don't see how this would be a grift. Tencent's funding seems to have been contingent on some kind of metric, and they pulled out because Highguard fell short.

From some interviews, it sounds like it was just an ambitious mess that didn't have good testers. IIRC, they said something about everyone pitching 5 ideas every day, and added a couple each time. And it really shows, it is some kind of franken-monster that combines all kinds of ideas that make a patchwork of meh. And then the testers they had either all worked on the game, or were friends with those that did, and nobody wanted to be a downer so they always gave positive feedback.

They should have learned from Marvel Rivals and used an already well-known IP and all the thighs and tits they can get their hands on. You can't just make a shitty game and expect it to sell, you have to manipulate your players into thinking it's more than just a shitty game

It’s a PvP hero shooter + siege + looter + capture the flag + demolition all in one game, if that’s your alley.

These games are build with a budged so high they either have to rival overwatch in its glory days or they get scrapped and written off as a loss since they will never be profitable.

Triple A studios have arrived in the corporate world a while ago were long term profits are irrelevant if your quarterly earnings aren't what the investors want.

The best part - they tried to pretend they're not AAA. They portrayed themselves as small, indie, self-publishing studio, whereas behind curtains the stream of money from Tencent was wide as a river

Gambling, pretty much. They go all in on a bet that it will explode and make tons of money, take out loans based on that expectation, setting themselves in a position where either it is a major success or it is an utter failure, no in between.

The gaming market is so saturated these days that it's kinda baffling this approach is still being taken. Like I hadn't even heard of this game before this.

2 million players gave the game a chance thanks to Geoff. I doubt the game would even get 1000 players if they decided to shadow drop it like they originally intended.

The fact that they laid off most of their staff just weeks after release shows that they couldn’t afford a slow ramp up.

I agree completely. There's only one chance to make a first impression. The final ad slot of TGA needs a worthy game that the audience can be excited about, and putting the most generic, most corporate-looking game there felt like an insult. Kind of like this absolute flop.