In the deadly world of online gaming, there are no more successes – only survivors games

What does success look like for online video game developers? In 2026, the answer couldn’t be clearer: no one has a clue.

Consider Highguard, the first major flop of 2026. Signs were promising when it launched on January 26, with Steam hitting 100,000 concurrent players — in addition to those enjoying the game on PlayStation and Xbox, which doesn’t announce player counts. As a free-to-play game, the barrier to entry for Highguard was low. And thanks to a major ad placement at the end of The Game Awards in December — a raucous venue usually reserved for established hitmakers, not free-to-play newbies — curiosity was high.

But Haygard’s collapse was rapid. According to Bloomberg, 90% of players quit the game after a week. A month later, developer Wildlight Entertainment announced it would end the service on March 12, after less than 50 days online. By the time you read this, it’s already too late. Highguard is gone, and Wildlight says the 2 million players logged into the game can’t come back if they want to. Two million players. However, this game is a failure.

Could things have gone differently? In hindsight, there were strategic mistakes. The refusal to conduct public playtests prior to release appears to have been an error in judgement. Because Highguard’s developers borrowed freely from so many genres, the shooter had a compelling but complex structure, with multiple stages meant to give matches an ebb and flow in the sport: this complexity could have been tweaked or presented better.

However, none of these reasons adequately explain why the game didn’t last for two months. The explanation is simple: games are now investments aimed at achieving immediate and amazing returns.

What Highguard really needed, like many other games, was time. It’s time for the players to learn what the solution is, and Wildlight’s time to determine what was working and what wasn’t. However, Wildlight was not given that time. Much of the studio’s funding came from Chinese conglomerate Tencent, the world’s largest video game company — something Wildlight did not initially disclose. The same Bloomberg post-mortem on Highguard details how the cash infusion came with serious strings attached, and Highguard’s immediate and dramatic struggle to retain players quickly led to it withdrawing its funding.

Live-service games, which are meant to be played online forever while regularly charging players for ephemeral trinkets, are an unforgiving business for even the most talented studios. Executives love live-service games for their ability to provide endless revenue, and they want to emulate the success of giant games like Fortnite. As for the developers… well, it’s hard to say if the developers like them at all. Online reviews are extremely negative about this type of game, with every available metric of market share being scrutinized by analysts ready to declare “dead game!”, and players who He does Like what’s on offer they’ll quickly tear through everything they’ve produced, anticipating a steady rhythm of new content to keep them satiated and coming back for more.

The mainstream video game industry is increasingly run like a speculative market, rather than a business looking for customers. Potential new games are forever created with the expectation that they will be instant hits, and their chance of performing is getting shorter all the time. No publisher has demonstrated this attitude more than Sony, which greenlit dozens of live service games earlier this decade only to cancel most of them before release, shuttering the studios dedicated to them. In 2024, Concorde, which lasted only two weeks, broke out of this haphazard strategy, and remains at the bottom of the live-service mania.

However, Sony had a huge success with the live service: Helldivers 2, which sold 20 million and still has a healthy player base. This month it launched Marathon, Bungie’s exciting and stylish new shooter. Like Highguard, Marathon faced massive skepticism from the YouTuber/commentator community, especially after running a closed alpha trial that left influencers and critics frustrated. But unlike Highguard, the game became a critical darling.

Bungie has spent the past twelve years maintaining Destiny, a groundbreaking online shooter from which others in the live service space have learned many lessons. This gives Marathon a huge leg up over other live service games, some of which rely more on hope and arrogance than experience. Marathon is also part of an exciting new subgenre, the extraction shooter, which made its first breakthrough last year in Arc Raiders. There’s also style to take into consideration: Marathon’s art direction is harsh, neon and unlike anything else on the market. It’s an engaging game in a way like few other big-budget games.

But even with this promising outlook, the truth is that Marathon’s fate is no less certain than Haygard’s, because the existential threat he faces is the same: profit margins. There are numbers that the marathon must reach in order to survive, and we do not know what they are. It’s not a game, it’s an investment, and returns are expected – and will continue to be expected – as long as the game servers remain active. Perhaps these expectations will be reasonable in the short term. Maybe they’ll become obscene next year, or the year after that. At any given time, Bungie may have to endure further staff losses, compounding the talent lost since the studio laid off 220 employees in 2024, making maintenance of this exciting new game even more difficult.

In competitive video games like Marathon and Highguard, there is a metric called “time to kill”. It is a term that refers to how long a player must be able to sustain damage, on average, before their character “dies” and they are out of the match. There’s a good point to make: you want the player to feel like the time to kill is long enough to react when they’re shot, but not so long that they’re emboldened to be reckless. If the kill time is too short? That’s when you feel wronged. That’s when you start losing people.

With the fast pace of the Internet, it doesn’t take long for a reputation to build, no matter how unearned. Companies are currently setting money on fire in an attempt to tie players into endless loops of play and trading, while also declaring that they will not commit to anything. Damage is being done at an unsustainable level. Why would anyone stick around? Killing time is absolute killing.