Night Street Games, a studio founded by Imagine Dragons’ lead singer, Dan Reynolds, and his brother, recently put out a statement about the future of its underperforming multiplayer shooter Last Flag. While most announcements of this ilk spell the end of the game in question — think Highguard — Last Flag’s future is going to be more community-focused.
Last Flag launched on April 14, but subsequently made headlines for its low concurrent player count, which still hasn’t rebounded. In a Steam post, Night Street Games admits that “our player count is not currently where we need it to be to support additional development beyond our upcoming planned patches,” confirming that Last Flag is underperforming its expectations.
This was not a “going offline” announcement, though, as the studio stated that it is “shifting our focus to make sure those updates give tons of value and control to our players so the game can continue to thrive and grow.” The post goes on to explain that a new character, a new map, a new game mode, leaderboards, and new cosmetics will come to Last Flag over the next few months, but those aren’t the most important additions.
The new features Night Street Games sees as most critical to Last Flag’s future are that of custom game lobbies and match rule sets. It teased unique match rules based on games like Team Fortress 2, GoldenEye 007, and Super Smash Bros. and said it hopes these additions add more replay value to the struggling game.
Currently, it’s extremely tough for new competitive multiplayer games to break out, and Last Flag’s capture the flag gameplay didn’t enthrall players in the way Night Street Games hoped. Still, I can commend the studio for stating, “We don’t want to kill our game — we want to give it to the community who helped us get here,” rather than announcing a server shutdown after an underwhelming launch.
If you want to give Last Flag a shot, it has a free demo available every weekend, or it can be purchased outright for $14.99 on Steam.