Highguard to Go Offline After Rapid Player Drop

Highguard found itself in the spotlight of the online video game discourse back in December during The Game Awards show, when host Geoff Keighley made a special introduction for the game’s trailer, which came very late in the show, a time reserved for some of the night’s biggest reveals. The next day, there were questions as to what this free-to-play multiplayer shooter from a new studio was. Now, less than two months after its release, Highguard is being shut down. 

Developer Wildlight Entertainment posted on X about Highguard’s shutdown on Tuesday. The developer says it was unable to gain the player base it needed to get the game going, and it will shut down servers on March 12. 

“Despite the passion and hard work of our team, we have not been able to build a sustainable player base to support the game long term,” the studio said. “Servers will remain online until March 12th. We hope you’ll jump in with us one more time to show your support and get those final great matches in while we still can.”

In his review of Highguard, CNET’s David Lumb described the game as a first-person shooter that had the lane-skirmish fighting found in multiplayer online battle arena games and base raiding mechanics found in titles like Rainbow Six: Siege. The developers described this new mash-up as a “raid shooter.” Wildlight has since acknowledged that the initial showing of the game at The Game Awards didn’t properly represent the game. 

When the game was released on Jan. 26, Highguard started off strong. Nearly 100,000 people were playing the game on PC at launch, according to SteamDB. That number dropped significantly in the days that followed, and in the last week of February, it fell to slightly more than 400 a day. Things were looking bleak for Wildlight for most of February as the player count dwindled. On Feb. 11, members of the developer team posted on LinkedIn about layoffs, and the game’s website went down on Feb. 17.

“Negative press is a hard stink to clean off,” Lumb said today. “When gamers decide to hate a game, they’ll sink it, especially if it doesn’t have years of runway like No Man’s Sky.”

On the r/games subreddit, in a thread about the announcement, posters shared their problems with the game. Some pointed to dated visuals, while others said the gameplay was confusing and sorely needed refinement.

Former Wildlight developers told Bloomberg on Feb. 26 that they felt it was the “hubris” of the studio leadership that led to the game’s demise. The studio was made up of former members of the team that developed Titanfall, Titanfall 2 and Apex Legends, and they were not aware of how the gaming landscape had changed since those games were released. 

Wildlight says it intends to continue updating the game. A final update will be made available sometime on Wednesday or Thursday, and it will include a new character, a new weapon, account level progression and skill trees.