https://www.vgchartz.com/article/467193/highguard-is-shutting-down-march-12/

Welp, there it is. Lasted longer than Concord, but still shorter than the lifespan of a honey bee drone.

Thanks a lot, Geoff.

Yet another failed attempt at chasing the GaaS model.

I don't understand. It's pretty clear that GaaS is a failure, and gamers are avoiding it more and more.

Why do the companies keep insisting on that?

High risk, high reward - guess which part companies see from that. I suspect gamers are still there for GaaS, you just need to be able to attract them to your game instead of all those gazillion others.

Because if just one game sticks the landing. That's an infinite gold mine of cash.

That's why Microsoft bought Mojang for Minecraft.

Why Sony keeps trying with their devs to get one that's a winner.

Why Take Two and Rockstar can take their time with GTA VI, because they have GTA Online to fall back on.

The audience is absolutely there for GaaS, it's just that the competition is unbelievably crowded. If you just blink, 12 more of those games pop up. Everybody wants a piece of that pie, and they'll keep trying if they think they can land just one.

A way it lasted less than Concord is that was announced all the way back in May 2023 before dying in September 2024 while this went from announcement to getting shut down in just three months. That has to be some sort of record.

Part of it is "high risk high reward" as others in the thread said, but a much bigger factor is that development pipelines have ballooned to such a degree that the projects you are seeing now have been worked on for a minimum of 6 years, which was before it was known that GaaS was often a bad idea. Concord was 8 years development, if I remember correctly.

Concord was NOT in development for 8 years. firewalk didn't even exist until 2019 so i really don't get how this isnn't obvious to  people. it was only in full scale development for about 4 years. it was long confirmed that "8 years" just referred to back when it was a napkin sketch pitch.

And honestly when single player games fail they tend to fail harde. It is less dramatic in the public eye because people can still play them but it takes a lot more sales for AAA single player to make back their budgets. that's the real reason GAAS is appealing. in the end you get your bills paid by a core devoted playerbase for years regardless of where the bulk of the public is going.