the guild wars 2 spvp mode is one of those weird games-within-games that i fully think could have existed as its own game. i know why they didn’t bother to make it its own thing and only kept it as a side-attraction, but it would have been cool.
i bet there were a lot of niche pvp game that were really good too but couldn’t justify their independent existence on a few thousand players either. off the top of my head there’s battlerite, duelyst, atlas reactor. they were all kind of strangled by the need to grow.
tbh it seems you either need the preexisting support from a big ip or huge market share to exist in that space.
