You could be forgiven for not remembering Highguard, Wildlight Entertainment’s debut PvP raid shooter. Released last month after a storm of controversy at The Game Awards, it saw strong player counts on Steam…which quickly plummeted. User reviews rose from “Overwhelmingly Negative” to “Mixed,” which did little to staunch the bleeding.
Wildlight announced layoffs shortly after its release, even though a core team remains in place to deliver content. Interestingly, a new report by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who spoke to former staff, indicated that the studio, which consisted of 100 people, had enough “financial runway.” However, in an alleged meeting on February 11th, leadership revealed that they were “out of money.”
Apparently, Tencent, which was alleged to have been secretly funding the title, pulled funding because metrics like retention rate weren’t met (even if management didn’t explicitly phrase it as such). There are reportedly fewer than 20 developers remaining on the title, with those who left citing “hubris” at how leadership handled the title. It’s not completely unexpected, given that these were the folks who delivered Apex Legends, but times have certainly changed.
Wildlight continues to issue updates for Highguard, following its roadmap to a T. It hasn’t abruptly wrapped things up, like Anthem, but thus far, things aren’t looking good in terms of player counts. For more details, check out our review of the base game.
