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Highguard Highlights the Problem with Engagement Bait | Unpacked (Patreon)

Published:
2026-01-30 16:02:19
Imported:
2026-01

Content

This week's episode of Unpacked is now available!

Files

Highguard Highlights the Problem with Engagement Bait | Unpacked

A very uncontroversial game has stirred up a lot of controversy, or at least that's how it looks. Timestamps: 0:00 Introduction 1:18 Internet and Highguard 4:22 Player base at launch 7:37 Bytesized Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/SecondWindGroup Second Wind Merch: https://store.dftba.com/collections/second-wind https://sharkrobot.com/collections/second-wind

Comments

Ronny Cook

Before the Bytesized kicked in, I was thinking... so this is a reaction to the prevalence of reaction videos. If you hadn't included the review, this would have been spectacularly ironic. As it is, nice save.

ergotpoisoning

Yeah I was thinking the exact same thing, but embedding the Bytesized review was a very smart move.

ergotpoisoning

This is all on Geoff and TGA in my opinion. I don't think 95% of the ragebait videos get created if folks didn't feel like the initial reveal was a rug-pull. Agree with the general assessment of the media landscape being a cesspit and a nightmare for devs/creators to navigate, but with this specific game I think the scale of the negative response can be attributed to a single decision. And who knows, maybe it works out! It worked out for No Man's Sky! Sure it released to extremely negative reviews and many prospective fans who felt betrayed, but the hype did enable it to generate enough of a core audience to justify Hello Games continuing to plow resources into the project until it transformed into the beloved redemption story we have today. Maybe Highguard will pull off a similar trick, the pre-launch hype giving them a large enough player base to weather initial negativity and justify continued investment. Feels though that with a F2P title that is a narrower tightrope to tread.

Second Wind

Well, I also analyzed the reactions instead of just "reacting" to be fair lol. Kinda hard to avoid that with Unpacked as a format.... I'm literally analyzing and reacting to the news of the week.

Jason Youngberg

Calling the game "woke" is just evidence that people who use the word as a derogatory have no idea what it means.

Davsau

Great idea to do the video like this! Maybe instead of mining resources yourself you spawn in NPCs who do it for you, but need protecting?

David C

That stealth Bytesized review drop was a great move

CthulhumonWriter

Player Count is just the most recent popular metric that is both fundementally meaningless and useless for determining the quality or value of game (like graphical specs).

Ryallen

Tbh I don't think No Man's Sky should be the standard by which flops like this are held. "It could happen" but the reason NMS and Cyberpunk 2077 are so noteworthy is because it did happen, there are countless other games that failed as badly, if not worse, and were never improved

Mochammad Santaka

This is a great write up. It's the sad reality where engagement is king nowadays. Healthy and meaningful criticism is of course important, But, I think it's also important that people need to know between a constructive criticism and outright rage bait. Recently I saw a Facebook page posting about the new James Bond games where people were outrage about "non existent pc spec.". I was like, do people actually get angry because of that? Goodness me.