Greg Miller

Crazy that you could launch a game and be closed this quickly that you just don't have like they rode this thing to on empty right across the finish line and then needed such a huge return on players jumping in and buying stuff and doing things to justify keeping it around and keeping everything going.

Crazy that we're having this conversation now.

And five days ago, Bloomberg published a story that is the story behind High Guard's failure, right?

Let me give you a few graphs from there.

It's what we're talking about in getting into this, right?

When High Guard came out on January 26th, and of course, this is the Try Guy, Jason Schreier, the player count was impressive, peaking at nearly 100,000 concurrence on PC platforms, Steam, with similar numbers across PS5 and Xbox.

But early impressions proved negative.

And because the game was free to play, it only generated revenue from in-game payments that would require players to stick around.

Reviewers criticized a number of elements, including the large map sizes and tedious mechanics such as mining, many of which were vestiges of early versions of Highguard.

Critics also pointed out that the game was so complicated that it was much less fun if you were playing with strangers and the mics weren't on, a problem that Wild Light might have identified earlier by letting the public try out the game before release.

and the days that followed Highguard's biggest problem became player retention, a challenge that Wildlife's management emphasized to the staff multiple times.

A week after the game's launch, they'd lost roughly 90% of their players, which was a scary number.

A hastily released 5v5 mode was praised, but didn't bring people back.

Still, Wildlife staff were under the impression that they had enough financial runway to keep working on the game and addressing issues for at least the next few months.

But at an all-hands meeting on February 11th, just two weeks after the game's release, the company told its employees the studio was out of money and most of their 100-person team would be laid off.

They would stay employees for another week and then receive a small severance.

During the meeting, management said that Tencent had pulled the studio's funding, according to people familiar with the events.

Although the company didn't spell it out, staff were left with the impression that their financing was contingent upon hitting certain metrics, such as retention rate, which they'd failed to even come close to achieving.

And again, I hate to bang the old drum that I do all the time, but I think you turned to Tencent.

I mean, don't get me wrong.