The story of Highguard reads like a fever dream, marked by an oddly timed Game Awards trailer, surprisingly encouraging player numbers at launch, a flurry of large-scale updates, and then, just weeks after launch, the abrupt laying off of most of the development team.
The game isn’t dead and in fact is still getting updates presumably from a skeleton crew, but articles that read like in memoriam notices are already starting to appear. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, for example, has a new report with the headline ‘The Story Behind the Failure of Highguard’, in which the veteran journalist talked to 10 former employees of Wildlight about “one of 2026’s first gaming disasters — the sudden collapse of Wildlight Entertainment and its first game, Highguard.”
As with any failure, the fault can probably be rightfully divvied up among many different factors, but the sources in Bloomberg’s reporting mostly lay that blame on “hubris,” saying early calls to open the game up for pre-release testing and feedback were rejected by leadership, a team of Respawn veterans who were confident they had the next Apex Legends on their hands.
Although launch player figures were strong at about 100,000 peak concurrent players on Steam, critical and user reviews weren’t proportionately great and those player numbers started to quickly dwindle, making player retention the biggest concern at developer Wildlight. According to Bloomberg, Highguard lost about 90% of its players in a week, and even so, there was reportedly still confidence that there was enough funding from Tencent to keep the game running for at least a few more months.
Bloomberg reports that an all hands-on meeting took place two weeks after launch in which Wildlight leadership informed employees that Tencent had pulled funding and that most of the 100-person team would be laid off. About 20 developers are reportedly still at the studio and hoping to save the game, but as Bloomberg points out, the current Steam charts paint a grim picture.
“There’s no way this will flop”: Laid-off Highguard dev says internal sentiment was sky-high, “but then the trailer came out, and it was all downhill from there”
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