Wildlight Leisure’s free-to-play shooter Highguard is lastly out on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Sequence X|S after weeks of silence, and already, the sport has virtually eclipsed 100,000 concurrents on Steam.
If you happen to try the Most Performed chart on Steam, you’ll see that Highguard is clutching the number 10 spot (97,249 current), warding off the 2023 RPG Baldur’s Gate 3 (84,313 present) on the time of this writing. It is nowhere to be found in the PC gaming distributor’s Top Sellers chart, however that is most likely as a result of this listing tracks the best-selling video games by income, and whereas Highguard’s monetization technique is fairly customary stuff for a free-to-play sport, it would not seem to have set the charts on hearth. There may be additionally a year-one roadmap with an replace dropping each two months beginning in February.
That is stunning for the sheer indisputable fact that, till this very second, nobody actually knew something in regards to the sport. Up till it launched on January 26 for consoles and PC, there had been no fight overviews, no hero showcases, no lore explanations–nothing. And but, regardless of the little or no marketing–aside from popping up within the closing slot at The Recreation Awards on December 11–Highguard is seemingly attracting an viewers. Whether or not that is delicate curiosity or outright fascination stays to be seen, however over 300K people are watching the game being livestreamed on Twitch proper now.
There are some caveats to the numbers, although. Whereas spectacular, Steam concurrents are only one piece of a sport’s total reputation. Participant information on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Sequence X|S isn’t often shared, so it may very well be far greater within the grand scheme of issues, or it may very well be considerably worse on these explicit platforms. Additional, the way in which a sport begins is not essentially indicative of its long-term participant retention. We will simply take a look at EA’s Skate as a chief instance of this; the free-to-play, live-service skateboarding sim had an all-time peak of 134,901 gamers at launch, and now, Skate sometimes hovers between 3,000 and 4,000 gamers at any given time.
Nonetheless, these numbers do look stable on paper, even when Wildlight Leisure is not notably involved with large participant counts as proof of its success. Solely time will inform how lengthy gamers stay within the sport, as Highguard went from a “mostly negative” rating to an “overwhelmingly negative” rating on Steam.