At this point, Wildlight Entertainment’s Highguard is about as dead of a horse as it can be. It looked mid when it was revealed, it turned out to be mid when it was released, and its (very likely) failure has been examined and mocked from just about every angle. I didn’t (and still don’t) have much sympathy for the project either, as it was to me (and many others) a symbol of the corporate slop-pushing that’s been happening in the AAA gaming space for a very long time now. The only bit I had was for Wildlight as a studio, since they were supposedly independent and self-funded, meaning that Highguard’s failure was going to hurt everyone involved. Except, it turns out that that was a lie.

In a recent report by Game File, it came out that Wildlight Studios was not, in fact, an independent operation. In actuality, the studio and its flagship project were funded by Tencent, and that backing was kept secret for some reason. It has not yet been disclosed to what degree Tencent funded the studio, but Wildlight said that it was “fully funded” for years, so it must not have been an insignificant amount. As for why Wildlight chose to keep its gargantuan corporate backer a secret, we can only surmise, but, in my opinion, it was likely so that the studio could claim the “indie” status, which it enjoyed throwing quite a bit.

Now, it would be naive to think that true indie studios don’t get at least some funding from large corporate entities. The fact of the matter is that games cost money to make, and that money has to come from somewhere. (I’d argue that games need not be massive projects like Highguard and others, but that’s a talk for another time.)

The issues I see with this, though, are two-fold. The first and most immediate deliberately hiding that kind of backing in order to play on customers’ sympathy and mislead them into thinking that they’re getting a more creative “indie” experience. That, to me, feels very much like false advertising and should be punished as such.

The other, potentially worse, issue is the encroachment of large corporations and investment firms into the independent space. Now, I’m not saying that I don’t want smaller developers to get the money they need to make the games they want. I’m not saying that I don’t want them to be successful. What I am saying is that this kind of money almost always comes with strings attached. Once you have investors, you then are on the hook to make something that will generate an acceptable return on that investment.

That kind of situation can very easily warp things. It can mean the addition of certain mechanics, or maybe the incorporation of a cash shop to sell cosmetics. I could even mean a shift in genre into something that can sell things more easily to its players. I mean, just look at Highguard. It’s an “indie” game with all the hallmarks of a corporate AAA live service. Was it always going to be this form the outset, or is it the result of years worth of compromises made in the name of pleasing the investors? We can’t know for sure and likely never will, but the potential is there all the same.

I don’t want to see the indie space to become “AAA-lite,” with its beauty and creativity stifled in the name of getting the returns before release from a corporate investor rather than after release from hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of happy fans. And yet, it seems inevitable as all these money men shift their focus to indie devs. Who could say “no thanks” to letting someone else shoulder the financial risk of development? Who could say “nah, I’m good” to getting paid to make your game right now rather than staking everything on a successful release? Very few people could, I bet. Heck, I’m not even sure I could, if it were me.

That’s the issue, though. Unless you’re supoer passionate about making exactly the game you want to make, then you’re not going to pitch that to potential investors. You’re going to adjust it, alter it or even outright change it to something else, something safer that they’re more likely to back. And what happens when everyone is making safe, profitable, “investor-friendly” games? Indie stops being “indie” and becomes something else entirely. It becomes everything we’ve all come to despise about modern AAA gaming.

Look, I’m just a fan of games. I don’t even make them. I just want to enjoy them and continue to enjoy seeing all the cool new ideas that still, for now, keep pouring out of the independent space. I’m not saying that smaller developers should refuse any and all investment. I’d just like them to very carefully consider the conditions that come with the money and avoid selling too much in exchange for it.

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What do you think of the Highguard story? How do you feel about corporate incursion into indie games?