Highguard didn’t flop

It’s surprising to hear how expectant the Highguard studio was before launch. Despite running no public playtests, the mood ahead of the Game Awards reveal was that the competitive shooter would likely be a major hit, according to a former employee of the now-diminished studio.

It’s not any particular feature of Highguard that makes me think the confidence was misplaced. It’s just the fact that most new shooters aren’t massive hits. Where did anyone get the idea that there are sure things?

Even Fortnite, the model for the modern FPS live service mega-hit, was shrugged off by the public before Epic’s famous pivot to battle royale. Most have not been so lucky, and it hasn’t mattered how successful they’ve previously been or even how good anyone thinks their game is. Remember Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski’s LawBreakers? I thought it was fun. It wasn’t a hit, and neither was Bleszinski’s also-fun battle royale pivot attempt, Radical Heights. That studio’s long gone.

As pointlessly rabid as the social media response to Highguard has been, I don’t think the internet’s recreational cruelty is to blame for the modest playerbase. I don’t think any deep analysis at all is required to understand why Highguard isn’t a huge hit. It’s a decent game—Morgan gave it a 65% in his review—but even if it had been a great game it wouldn’t necessarily have blown up like Arc Raiders, because most games don’t.

Cool new shooters of every variety release every year, and the default state for all of them, no matter how good they are or how much money was spent to develop them, is not millions of players. Here are some examples:

• Straftat: One of our favorite games of 2024. All-time peak Steam concurrents: 2,202
• Echo Point Nova: Another competitor for the best FPS of 2024. All-time peak Steam concurrents: 1,143
• Mycopunk: A recent co-op shooter that we liked. All-time peak Steam concurrents: 2,832
• Enlisted: An interesting-sounding free-to-play shooter from 2024. All-time peak Steam concurrents: 7,518
• FragPunk: A 5v5 hero shooter published by NetEase in 2025. All-time peak Steam concurrents: 113,946 (but now hovering at around 2,000, just like Highguard)
• Quake Champions: An honest attempt to bring Quake into the modern era that left early access in 2022. All-time peak Steam concurrents: 17,476

The couple thousand concurrent Steam players Highguard has right now puts it in league with those games, and why would it be in a different league? Because the developers worked on Apex Legends? Ubisoft’s XDefiant was led by Mark Rubin, whose credits include Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2, games that defined many of the elements still seen in modern shooters. I liked it. It didn’t last long.

And remember Rocket Arena, the shooter EA launched in 2020 and took off sale in 2023? Probably not, but the studio behind it was founded by a top designer on Halo 4 and 5. It wasn’t a big deal. Most games aren’t.

The Rocket Arena studio, Final Strike, is still around, though. It worked on Fortnite’s OG season, and now it apparently has a new tactical shooter in development. There are other studios like it. Diabotical, an Epic-exclusive arena shooter with origins in the pro Quake scene, didn’t really break into the mainstream, but GD Studio has gone on to release a roguelike spin-off on Steam.

Keeping a studio going, and perhaps one day iterating your way to hit territory, may be the only kind of success it’s reasonable to shoot for. Almost half of the games released on Steam last year received fewer than 10 user reviews. Highguard has done quite well by comparison! It’s only a flop next to the very rare games that are immediately massive hits.

Alas, despite telling us just before launch that Highguard didn’t need “super huge” player counts to succeed, the studio was clearly betting on it being one of those exceptional games, because a normal launch wasn’t enough to keep most of its staff employed. I hope they all land on their feet.