Just last week, Night Street Games, an indie studio founded by Imagine Dragons’ lead singer and manager Dan and Mac Reynolds, released Last Flag. It’s a 5v5 multiplayer shooter built exclusively around the iconic capture the flag game mode, a favourite of the Reynolds brothers.
I’ve not played it, but it’s got positive reviews on Steam and looks fun enough. It’s dirt cheap, too, costing just $15. Despite that, it’s struggling to find its audience right now, debuting with less than 600 concurrent players and declining in the days since.
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“I really don’t think it’s how the best games—or art in general—are made. You absolutely want to listen to your players when you develop, but the creative core has to be what inspires you and your team, or it won’t have soul and you’ll burn out trying to force it into existence. So although we aren’t blind to what happens around us with other games, we really try to protect the team’s freedom to build without trying to think about other hits and misses when it comes to creative vision.”
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He adds that “players will still jump in and play something new—even a shooter in an already popular subgenre—if it brings something to the table that’s different and exciting for them.” That’s exactly what the team have tried to do with Last Flag, designing an entire game around the CTF mode.
It’s a sentiment shared by Arc Raiders’ design director Virgil Watkins (also interviewed by GamesRadar), who explained that Embark’s extraction shooter wasn’t an attempt to “break into a particular type of shooter or follow a trend.” The team tried many different types of games, including co-op PvE, before settling on its extraction format. It wasn’t designed to explicitly carve a path in the multiplayer shooter and extraction genres; it just did because it offered something new.
As much as I agree that sticking to a creative vision rather than caving to the whims of players is generally the way to go, it’s no guarantee of success. The past few years have been a harsh lesson that you most likely won’t make the next big hit, especially for live service games: we’ve all got plenty enough to play already, especially with how time-consuming some of these live games can be. Concord died after two weeks, Highguard disappeared after three months, and many more games have come and gone without the attention of such a spotlight. Even Bungie’s Marathon is having a hard time retaining players despite being a fantastic FPS and enjoying a strong launch.
Last Flag’s not off to the best start, but Reynolds claims that its “success will not be measured by how many people play it,” since the team “already achieved the most important thing we could control, which is making a game we love and are proud of as a team.”
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