Highguard, the latest live-service failure, is shutting down

Originally intended to be a surprise launch like Apex Legends was in 2019, Wildlight instead took up Geoff Keighley’s offer to announce Highguard at The Game Awards 2025, a decision Wildlight founder and CEO Dusty Welch told Polygon was “maybe a little risky in hindsight.” Highguard was released on Jan. 26 after that much-maligned reveal and weeks of silence on Wildlight’s part.

Players rushed to check it out, with Highguard peaking at nearly 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, but not all of them walked away fans — and plenty of them walked away. While SteamDB player count charts aren’t wholly illuminating of a game’s reach (Highguard also launched on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X), they are the only public figures we can turn to for a sense of how many people are engaging with a given game. On Steam, Highguard‘s playerbase rapidly shrunk; it peaked at just over 15,000 players the first weekend after launch. A month after its Jan. 26 launch, Highguard was barely pulling in 1,000 concurrent players on Steam.

It wasn’t for lack of trying on Wildlight’s part. The developer quickly added a 5v5 mode after launch and later made it permanent to address player complaints that there wasn’t enough action in the game. Another update introduced a new Warden (the game’s name for playable heroes) and added tweaks around the margins to enhance the flow of a match. Another update released in February introduced yet another 5v5 mode, this one cutting out the preparation and looting phases from matches. Evidently, nothing Wildlight did was enough to bring players back. In the days leading up to Highguard‘s closure, the game was peaking at less than 500 concurrent players on Steam.

We had our own issues with Highguard, with reviewer Ford James writing that the game’s biggest problem being “too many ideas.”

“At its core, this is a first-person shooter where two teams of three duke it out to destroy their opponent’s base, MOBA-style,” we said in our review of Highguard. “However, there’s Rainbow Six Siege-style base fortifications, Overwatch-style hero abilities, survival game-inspired resource mining and gathering, vendor trading, and more. Together, it culminates in awkward pacing, despite the foundational FPS elements clearly showing the expertise of the team behind the game.”

Wildlight laid off “most of the team” just two weeks after the game launched, claimed a developer who was let go. Those layoffs were the result of financial backer Tencent pulling its funding, according to a Bloomberg report at the end of February. “Staff were left with the impression that their financing was contingent upon hitting certain metrics, such as retention rate, which they’d failed to even come close to achieving,” the report stated.