Highguard has raided its last fortress, will shutdown on March 12

When Highguard shuts down next week, it will have been available to play for a grand total of 46 days. That’s longer than the two weeks Concord received, but tragic for an online multiplayer game that was still in some form of active development. Wildlight Studios laid off some of its staff not long after Highguard launched, but a smaller team of developers has been supporting the game with new content since then, adding things like a “5v5 raid mode” and today’s final update.

While it’s easy to chalk up Highguard‘s failure to a shrinking appetite for live-service games or an inability to find an audience for the game’s mix of competitive hero shooter and MOBA strategy mechanics, the reality is more complicated. The first hint that Highguard‘s launch might be troubled was the dearth of information or marketing shared about the game after its debut at the Game Awards. Wildlight Studios’ staff was full of former Respawn employees who shadowdropped Apex Legends to great success, and Bloomberg reports Wildight’s executives thought they could pull off something similar with Highguard. The difference is, little was known about Apex Legends until after it launched, while players had over a month to stew on the Highguard trailer and form all sorts of opinions.

Wildlight’s inability to keep players coming back — SteamDB shows the game peaked at over 97,000 concurrent players and is now sitting at around 300 — also hurt its chances. Dwindling player counts reportedly played a role in one of Wildlight’s investors, Tencent, pulling funding, which reduced the runway the studio had to continue working on the game and likely prompted its layoffs. It would be simple if the lesson here was for future studios to give up developing online multiplayer games, but it really seems like not one, but all of these elements led to Highguard‘s ultimate demise.