You know a fad genre is well and truly dead when Forbes is reporting on it
Because no one wants to play them? Much less pay money to support them?
Also nobody trusts them. Why spend money on Highguard when there is no guarantee the game will still exist next year? They already layed off some important people.
If Highguard targeted low end hardware, included mod support and bundled in the server so that players can host and moderate their matches themselves and had no monetization beyond the initial price tag people would be all over it. But for some reason nobody does that anymore.
You can still play Quake III today, if it was doable then it’s more than doable now. But multiplayer game devs seemingly left behind that player first approach for good.
Dont forget player time is a limited resource all those online games are competing for. Everyone can only maintain so many daily goals and battle passes - even more so, if it requires coordinating with friends to play together.
Because nobody has the time to play another online only game when they are already loyal or addicted to the bigger games with a higher budget for predatory marketing research?