A shadow drop during a press conference can work at times, especially if it’s a DLC or a small indie title. Nintendo Direct Shadow Drops are very popular for this reason.
But a game like this can’t be shadow dropped. Sega Saturn was also proof of how bad major releases fair when shadow dropped
The Saturn was also a weird thing all around because the damned thing was basically obsolete right at the time it launched. They rushed it to market in North America to beat the Playstation to launch but of course with no marketing it failed, and that was in 1995 when the Dreamcast launched in Japan in 1998. It was made even worse because the 32x for the Genesis launched just a few months before that for the holiday season the year before, and then Sony launched the Playstation for the holiday season something around $100 cheaper than the Saturn.
Sega fucked themselves on both ends with hardware releases, pricing, and a rush to retail without bothering with a marketing campaign but lets be realistic, marketing wouldn't have saved it. And that was before Sony made a drastic price cut to the Playstation after the holidays making it cost half as much as the Saturn did at launch because they were willing to take the loss to move units and make up for it selling games and accessories.
Highguard had no cost pressure due to being a f2p game.
No release window pressure since they weren't trying to time it as a holiday release and there's nothing else major coming up that would compete directly with it.
Had time to put some kind of marketing campaign together if the dorito pope really did throw them the spot on the game awards at the last minute and still did nothing except a basic invited streamer event 2 days before launch that no one cared about.
Could have done a public beta, received feedback, and then made adjustments to the game for a future release to avoid a lot of the complaints.
Sega got fucked, but it wasn't simply because of the shadow drop and there was at least logic in why they tried to do it. Highguard had no excuse.