Last Flag, from Imagine Dragons’ Game Studio, Fights Shutdown After Two Weeks
- Low player count: Last Flag struggled to attract players after launch.
- Support cut back: Night Street Games says major future development is unlikely.
- Suggested fix: Fans propose making it free-to-play to grow the player base.
Last Flag is the latest casualty of the PvP game industry as the developers, Night Street Games, announced just before the weekend that its debut title has underperformed since its launch on April 14. Despite attempting to shirk a lot of live service trappings it hasn’t found enough players to warrant full future support.
Imagine Dragons’ vocalist Dan Reynolds founded Night Street Games with his brother (and the band’s manager) Mac Reynolds, and started development on Last Flag in 2021. In a post on the game’s Steam page and official Discord, Mac Reynolds posted the news regarding the future of Last Flag.
“Our hope was that we could find a sustainable audience by offering a complete game experience at an affordable price – one with no battle passes or microtransactions – and to win over players by making it with heart and doing it our way,” he said.
“If you’ve been following the Steam charts, you already know that Last Flag has been unable to find the audience it needs to give all of you the experience you deserve,” he added. “But that doesn’t mean we’re about to throw in the towel. The financial reality of our situation means we’re unlikely to be able to support additional development (including console, for now) beyond some upcoming patches.”
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First Game, Last Chance
A little confusingly, Mac also said that there were plans to release future content updates, including a “tenth character, a new map, a brand new game mode, cosmetics, leaderboards, and much more.” He thanked the game’s existing community and expressed his hope that they would be able to continue enjoying the game through custom lobbies.
“The faith that the community put into our shared dream means everything to us, so we’re going to make sure that the game doesn’t disappear. In addition to working with our backend partners and Steam to ensure that players can continue to play the game they purchased, we’ll be adding the ability for the community to set up custom lobbies with alternate game rules and find their own best version of Last Flag.”
Last Flag had just 558 peak concurrent players one day after launch, but this number rapidly dropped even lower to, at the time of writing, just 51 peak players. The game is also available via Epic Games so it’s not clear how many players are using it via that platform, but from the sounds of Mac’s comments it’s not a lot.
Even so, player reviews on Steam have been Mostly Positive, with many praising Last Flag for smooth controls and mechanics, and acknowledging that it’s clear it’s a passion project for Night Street Games as it’s actually fun to play. Somewhat ironically, a number of players have suggested that Night Street Games should turn Last Flag into a free-to-play title to try and bump the player count up as the biggest complaint is, unsurprisingly, that there are almost no real people to play against.
Passion and Experience Behind the Scenes
Night Street Games might be new, but it counts developers such as Matthew Berger and Jarrod Showers as part of the team. Berger worked for Blizzard on the likes of Diablo 3 and 4, and acts as the Game Director for Night Street Games, whereas Showers is a Lead Animator who worked for the likes of Raven Software and currently also acts as the Head of Animation for AnimSchool.
The Reynolds brothers have also been vocal about their love of gaming, with Mac stating in an interview with CGM: “We grew up playing games, you know, raised on Sierra online, LucasArts. And all these studios were super inspiring to us growing up. I used to do 3D modelling/animating as a kid. My brother Dan is a coder, and we talked about making games together for years.”
Mac also noted how the aim for Last Flag was to “recreate that magical experience when you’re a kid, actually hiding and finding [the flag],” although the game itself went through several iterations to get to where it is today.
Berger expanded on this, with “We used to have lots of monsters on the map that got in the way. There was fog-of-war that made it harder to find this place. We used to have items, and so you had to manage picking up items. We wanted the game to be faster. We wanted you to have this joy all the time – movement, discovery – and we didn’t want anything that got in the way of that. So we really focused, first and foremost, on the core elements of the game.”
It’s not clear what’s next for Night Street Games in terms of future projects as the company has almost no social media presence. This is a little weird given that Imagine Dragons is one of the biggest bands on the planet, so it stands to reason they know how marketing works. Even the press release material for Last Flag puts a strong focus on how the game features a “soundtrack created by Dan Reynolds, Grammy-nominated producer JT Daly (Benson Boone, K.Flay, Bully), and Dave Lowmiller (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Battlefield, Dead Space), using real vintage instruments for an authentic 1970s sound, with tracks featuring vocals sung by the actual contestant voice actors.”
Anyone interested in checking out Last Flag can also join the official Discord, which has a spirited and friendly community that’s already enjoying discussing strategies for hiding flags.
