Highguard’s failure is emblematic of something that has tormented videogame investors for years now: past live service hits do not equal future live service hits

Every time a game like Highguard craters, we collectively wonder why the games industry keeps chasing huge live service hits when so many of them utterly fail.

The obvious answer is that, well, sometimes you do end up with a Helldivers 2, and you make hundreds of millions of dollars and everyone thinks you’re really smart. But clearly, those bets are enormously risky, and I think one of the reasons for that is a reality of today’s games biz that has been tormenting executives and investors this decade: At least when it comes to live service games, past successes do not seem to be a good indicator of future success. Like, at all.

For the past month, I’ve been hearing grievances about my statement that “Highguard didn’t flop” from people who want to be sure I know that the competitive FPS did in fact flop. Serves me right for trying to be clever. What I pointed out beneath that headline—which I meant as a rhetorical jab, not a flat denial of reality—is that very few new shooters achieve the kind of instant hit status that Highguard’s leaders needed to sustain their studio.

As indicated by the reporting that has happened since, studio leaders hoped they could repeat the success of Apex Legends, which many of Highguard’s developers worked on. And if you’re an investor hoping for a big live service hit, why wouldn’t you back a project from people who previously made a big live service hit?

But it just doesn’t seem to work that way. Experience obviously matters in game development, as in any craft, but quality isn’t really the issue here. Highguard is fine, or so I’m told, but they specifically needed a hit, and it just doesn’t seem possible to manufacture one.

Just the other day, Riot Games—one of the most successful developers in existence—laid off a big portion of the dev team for its fighting game, 2XKO, which was developed with input from some of the world’s foremost experts in the genre, yet clearly hasn’t attracted the audience Riot desired or expected.

Even Valve, working with Magic: The Gathering designer Richard Garfield and in full control of Steam, inarguably the center of PC gaming, couldn’t sustain a card game. (Which perhaps explains why it’s taking such a slow, cautious approach with its latest game, Deadlock.)

So, what are the big players in the games industry to do when even their best bets lead to millions in losses, while every six months or so a game like Peak, whose development began at a game jam, climbs to the top of the Steam charts?

In a lot of cases, they’ve just given up. The frenzy of early-pandemic investment has led to some infamous flops like Concord and Highguard, but also dozens of games that never got a chance to flop (or succeed, we’ll never know).

In 2024, for instance, Microsoft cancelled a big survival game that was in development at Blizzard, and last year cancelled an MMO that was in development at Zenimax. More recently, NetEase pulled funding from a bunch of Western studios, causing the cancellation of a Warhammer MMO and an MMO from former-WoW designer Greg Street. XCOM designer Jake Solomon’s life sim was also recently cancelled. That barely scratches the surface.

Beyond that rash of cancellations and layoffs—which is probably not over—the future of the industry is still hazy. It’s hard to glean much from the new Xbox boss’ comments about focusing on “core Xbox fans and players,” and we’ll have to wait and see how the RAM crisis plays out alongside the rise—and perhaps fall—of generative AI investments.

I think we’ll start to get hints of what’s ahead relatively soon, though, as the last of the big pandemic swings succeed, fail catastrophically, or are cancelled, and investments made after the word “metaverse” dropped out of everyday speech—which from what I’ve been hearing from indie devs, are hard to come by—start to bear fruit.