Studio Wildlight Entertainment has confirmed that Highguard will be permanently shut down: the game's servers will be taken offline on March 14. Thus, the title will join the list of short-lived game services like Concord, which Sony shut down two weeks after release, refunding players' money.
Despite a series of failures in the game services segment, publishers and investors continue to fund such games. According to developer Tyler Glaiel, the reason lies in economics and investor expectations.
Glaiel, known for his work on Mewgenics and The End Is Nigh, explained that game services are effectively an investment bet. According to him, the probability of such a project "taking off" may be only about 5%, but the potential profit makes the risk justified.
Every game like Highguard or Concord is essentially a gamble for investors. If there is a 5% chance that the project will take off and bring in a billion dollars, then investing up to 50 million in such an attempt is still profitable.
According to his estimate, for large shareholders, such amounts are relatively small compared to the possible profit. That is why companies continue to fund expensive projects, even understanding that most of them will fail.
They are ready for the project to fail. But for those who have billions, this is not a problem - you can make such bets again and again until one of the projects covers the losses from the rest.
