• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

“Blame the gamers” backfires: Highguard dev’s tirade over reviews and memes draws heavy criticism

Blaming the gamers has rightly incensed them further. I suppose the developers felt they had nothing to lose, as they've committed studio suicide.
 
Unknown Soldier said:
It's going to? It already has lmao, the entire Western gaming industry is in full collapse because they hire people based on woke political ideology and make games to push that ideology. No one in Western gaming studios seems to make games which try to be fun anymore, they make games to try and force you to adhere to insane political views and unsurprisingly gamers aren't buying or playing those games

The Eastern gaming industry is in a full Renaissance these days, not only is Japan surging back from decades of dormancy but now South Korea and China are rising quickly and founding new studios and hiring new developers and pumping out new games people like. Marvel has largely quit Western developers because everything they made for Marvel was shit, the recent highly successful Marvel Rivals and the upcoming Marvel Tokon are both made by Eastern devs. I expect this trend to continue as Western media companies who own huge IP's will simply no longer trust Western devs to make a game which can sell copies, after Star Wars Outlaws I cannot imagine Disney continuing to invest into letting Ubisoft make Star Wars games for example
Click to expand...
This Up Here GIF by Chord Overstreet

The only thing I would add is I really want China and South Korean devs to start branching out into other genres for single player games other than just Soulslikes. If they can make quality games for other genres like turn-based RPGs, survival horror, action adventure (like Crimson Desert), character action (Tides of Annihilation), rouglites/rougelikes, whatever, then I'll happily never buy a AAA Western game again.
 
uncreativename said:
I'm not so sure that Highguard is supposed to be aimed mainly at women, but if they were trying to do that, that seems like some bad judgment lol. I mean, it's just common sense that these multiplayer shooter games are mostly played by men.

If you try to appeal to everyone all at once too much (which is what I think happened here, although it's a bit more complicated than that.), then you end up with a boring, safe product that appeals to no one, and if you try to appeal to an audience that isn't interested, you won't sell any copies either, so I think that you're right that these shooter games probably should be trying harder to appeal to men.
Click to expand...

Agreed that the game is not aimed at women. For the reason you stated and also because women don't necessarily want to play as unattractive and/or generic characters either. Based on the women I've played games with, that's certainly not the case. As well, if men want to play as cool characters then it's not a big jump to understand that women are the same. We're all human, after all.

I think your idea of trying to appeal to everyone is the actual issue. That and a fundamental misunderstanding of what "everyone" wants. To me, these projects comes across as devs who think their ideas and beliefs are the most important - more important than the audience they're trying to appeal to. It's why Concord launched with those character designs, why Veilguard put extremely obvious ideological beliefs in their game and sanitized the world and mythos, and the same goes for Highguard - just a hodge podge of safe character designs, game mechanics, etc. contained in a game that had technical problems and content problems right from the start. It's also telling that Highguard, just like other games of its ilk, did not seek customer feedback, ignored it when it did come, and then blamed the audience. That has also become a telltale sign of games designed for the 'modern audience'.
 
Last edited:
DeepEnigma said:
It's always been a fairly nepotistic industry, but now its shifted towards heavy ideological/cultural nepotism.

It's going to bite them.
Click to expand...

I think we've already started to see that bite happen. Games failing, lay-offs, studios closing, etc. To which I say - how absolutely terrible:

Q28NW2K4OoCFs26s.gif


Joking aside, it's hard to be sympathetic in this situation. The absolute cheek of imposing that nepotism on an unwilling audience deserves every bit of push back and the consequences that we've been seeing.
 
Toots said:
You are too kind, you surely don't know half of his depravity.
Dude has roaches as guest in his bedroom on stream, not because he hates himself but because he is terminally lazy. But at the same time can we expect anything else from an elite WOW player and twitch streamer ?

HAving said he also is a chill dude with non judgmental takes (apart from when needed) who has a great community behind him. The streams where he is bombarded with gacchi mucchi vids by his fans are very fun.
Click to expand...
His life will improve dramatically when he stops forcing himself getting good at games. I let skills comes naturally so I could live a life style without compromises.
 


Interesting video. She focuses more on how sure the devs were that their game was going to be a smash success. That confidence should have been a red flag that something was wrong. She's far more sympathetic to the dev than I am, but raises some interesting points about the development process and, in Highguard's case, how it and marketing were fraught with problems the studio didn't seem capable of seeing.

Edit: Oops, just saw there is a post about this. My bad.
 
Last edited:
It's interesting how most of this turd was funded by Tencent. The SVP sits on the advisory board of TGA. TGA charges them nothing for the promo and puts it at the end of their show ahead of much bigger games. Keighley promotes the shit out of it like the bought and paid for corporate shill that he is.

Could be a coincidence, but I doubt it.

Then the company blames gamers for it being live service garbage game #567 that no-one cares about despite it being one of the most astroturfed games in recent years.

Gamers won this one.
 
Last edited:
xenosys said:
Then the company blames gamers for it being live service garbage game #567 that no-one cares about despite it being one of the most astroturfed games in recent years.

Gamers won this one.
Click to expand...
Giant grift.

Even if the game was polished, the game's two biggest differentiators to wow shooter gamers were one mode mishmashing a few modes into one mode. And riding horses and brown bears to get around the giant maps faster.

Somehow those were the best brainer ideas to make a shooter for 2026.

Wild.
 
Last edited:
Sentenza said:
You were so close and yet you still missed the mark.
You are confusing the symptoms with the cause.

These games don't fail because they get dismissive comments.
They get dismissive comments and the "unjustified hate" precisely because they failed to grab anyone's attention (o to ignite anyone's hype) to begin with.
They just aren't appealing in the eyes of their target audience.
Click to expand...
EXACTLY.

If the game had kick ass character designs, an interesting campaign single player story mode, kickass music and non-stop action ... wouldn't people praise it, even though it wasn't Titanfall 3 or whatever?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

[PC Gamer] Highguard didn't flop
Opinion  2
86
527
Deerock71 replied
Dunkey : Highguard
33
585
falconhoof replied
Highguard Debuts on Steam with a peak CCU of 97k and 21% positive reviews
Platform  18 19 20 21 22
1K
2K
bighugeguns replied
Highguard dev blames content creators for the game's failure - "It was dead on arrival"
Opinion Drama Game Dev  3 4 5 6 7
331
886
TonberrysKnife replied
  • Poll
Highguard Betting Thread
48
1K
PeteBull replied
Top Bottom