Yesterday, I wrote about the launch of Highguard, a new free-to-play live-service game. The Steam player count was promising, even if the player reviews were less than kind. But now, just a day later, those players are already vanishing.
Highguard launched to just shy of 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, a very stong start. Now, usually when tracking stats on SteamDB you will see an ebb and a flow as major markets log off for the night. But each day you’ll see a surge of players logging back on, and if you’re very lucky, it’ll be close to the initial launch count, or sometimes even higher!
Highguard, though, has not seen that normal pattern occur. In the 30-hours since launching – and therefore past the point you’d expect to see players flow back in as they wake up or get home from work – Highguard has sat at around 18,000 concurrent players.
Doing some quick math, the player count has dropped by approximately 80%.
But based on my research, a drop of this size isn’t unheard of, or even uncommon, though it’s still not a great sign. The initial launch numbers put Highguard in an elite tier, as very, very few games ever hit the 100,000-concurrent player mark. The prominence it got at The Game Awards and its free-to-play pricetag mean a lot of people will hop on just to see what’s going on, so I’m not shocked to see a big drop in numbers.
The real test will come within the next few days. If the numbers can hold at 10,000-20,000 it may have a future, as the developers have stated they don’t actually need a lot of players for Highguard to work. Let’s be honest, 18,000 on PC alone is actually good for a small team’s brand new IP. Plus, we don’t know how well it’s performing on console.
With all that said, the big drop in players is a lot more worrying when you factor in the thousands of negative Steam reviews that will leave the game branded for a long time. There’s a small sliver of hope as today’s stats show the positive review ratio climbing a bit, but it’s still 4,800 positive reviews to 6,000 negative ones. It’s now sitting at 17,000 reviews total, with a “Mostly Negative” rating.
Are all those reviews genuine? Is it suffering from a classic case of Internet gangbanging? Probably at least a little, sure, but a lot of them have to be genuine, too.
Who the hell knew getting the prime spot on The Game Awards because host Geoff Keighley would end up being a bad thing? Still, it is doing infinitely better than Concord, so that’s nice.
