Few actually expected last year’s Game Awards to close with anything as earth-shattering as Half-Life 3, but if that kind of huge announcement were going to happen during the show, that’s when it would. Instead, Geoff Keighley cued up a trailer for an unknown hero shooter called Highguard. It didn’t go great.
The social media reaction was instantly hostile. Highguard was received as a ‘one more thing’ trespasser that had claimed an unearned seat of honor, although its developer did not pay for the slot as many assumed. The reveal has become a case study in how not to announce a game, but what really got people worked up is what Highguard’s developer did next: nothing.
I can’t fault Highguard’s creators for not being actively engaged internet piñatas, though. The implication of so many X posts and YouTube video titles is that it’s bizarre, catastrophic, and scandalous that we have not been showered with character trailers, deep dive articles, and developer quotes. The quietude is a little unusual, but lots of games don’t get all that, especially self-published games like Highguard.
And some Highguard developers did in fact post on social media after the announcement, with one of them subsequently saying: “Day 1 of being a game dev with a public-facing game and I got 75+ quote retweets personally ripping me apart, simply for being excited to share what I poured myself into for years.”
With that kind of response, they may as well just let the game speak for itself. It’s not as if there’s any actual scandal to respond to here. There’s no malfeasance inherent in some former developers of Titanfall 2, Apex Legends, and other popular shooters making another game in that extremely popular genre.
The Web 2.0 era has lasted long enough that I’ve nearly forgotten what it was like when silence was the status quo. Back in the day, you didn’t hear from game developers except in occasional magazine interviews and at fan conventions. They released games, we played them, and then we shouted at each other about them until they released the next one. They weren’t required to listen in.
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I don’t think we’re ever headed back to that world, where CEOs didn’t beef with each other on X all day or hold Reddit AMAs to quell fan uprisings. For one thing, clamming up just isn’t a privilege everyone can enjoy while chasing a living in games today. Niche games aren’t automatically going to be noticed, never mind be featured at the end of a big award show, and developers from marginalized backgrounds are routinely subjected to personal attacks and threats for seeking out their audience on social media.
But if you can say screw it and log off, it’s hard to fault it. As X in particular becomes less and less tolerable, I wonder if we’ll see developers pull back from the ‘we hear your feedback’ era more often, and just let the shouting take its course.
In this case, anyway, the cynical assumptions and militant demands for Highguard to explain itself have only made me more interested in riding its horsies around. That’s probably just reflexive rebelliousness against a perceived consensus. Or maybe the silent treatment works well on me. (“Men will really play Highguard instead of going to therapy,” etc.)
Whatever happens next week, I really doubt it hinges on whether they did or didn’t feed us enough marketing. People will try it, they’ll like it or they won’t, and this whole non-scandal will just scroll away in to the past.
