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If 2026 has taught us anything, it's that convincing people to play your new multiplayer shooter is hard. The ill-fated Highguard came and went within the space of three months after initially strong player counts dropped off a cliff. And while Marathon appears to have more staying power—which is a mercy because it is superb—all signs suggest it hasn't been the roaring success needed to recoup its alleged $200 million budget.
Things are so tough that even being the lead singer of a world famous band can't guarantee your game an audience, as demonstrated by the release of Last Flag. Developed by Night Street Games—an indie studio founded by Dan and Mac Reynolds, the lead singer and manager of Imagine Dragons— Last Flag is a 5v5 multiplayer shooter themed around the classic capture-flag-game mode.
Last Flag seemingly had everything going for it. It was revealed in a splashy trailer at last year's Summer Games Fest, and as noted by Kotaku, was marketed on the band's social media accounts, advertised to 10 million followers on Instagram. It was also released at a very reasonable price point ($15 in the US/£12 in the UK, with a 20% launch discount on top) and has no microtransactions.
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Sadly, that last point now seems unlikely to happen. When Last Flag launched on April 14, it attracted fewer than 600 concurrent players at its peak, according to SteamDB. That number has now dropped to just under 400 concurrent players in the last 24 hours. Overall player numbers will be higher than this, of course, but that isn't to say that they are high. The main complaint in Last Flag's (mostly positive) Steam reviews is that matches are heavily populated by bots, another sign the game is struggling to find an audience.
In a statement to Bloomberg (via Kotaku) a spokesperson for Night Street Games said that the studio was happy with the reviews it had received. But they wouldn't comment on sales, instead hoping to "build a sustainable community and nurture and grow it over time."
It's hard to identify where Night Street went wrong. The only thing I can point to is Last Flag's visual style, which is very Fortnite coded in a way that only seems to work for Fortnite nowadays (and even then, diminishingly so). Players seem generally weary of that pseudo-animated aesthetic, and a big reason why Marathon has seen what success it has is simply because it doesn't look like any other shooter in this space.
Hopefully, Night Street will have sufficient resources to give Last Flag a shot at longer-term success, although Mac Reynolds said to Bloomberg that "Raising money is one of the hardest and worst things to be doing in 2026 for any studio" meaning that "runway is going to be a challenge for everybody." The game is currently having a free weekend to celebrate its launch, so if all of this has made you curious, you can grab the timed demo over on Steam.
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