While Wildlight Entertainment’s former employees have spoken about the Highguard developer being completely independent, a report by Game File’s Stephen Totilo has indicated that the company might have been getting financial backing from Tencent. The report, per Totilo, has noted that neither company has disclosed this financial backing previously, and that they have also not yet offered any comment to confirm or deny it.
The funding seemingly came from the TiMi Studio Group, and was noted as being “the undisclosed lead financial backer” for the studio. Interestingly workers at the studio also seemed to be unaware of this money coming in, with the report noting that it was “one of several mysteries swirling around the studio”. The financial support didn’t involve any stakes in Wildlight Entertainment itself, however, with the report also stating that the studio is “technically independent and not part of TiMi.”
The studio was hit by lay-offs earlier this month owing to the negativity surrounding the PvP raid shooter. While the exact number of employees affected wasn’t revealed, the studio said in a statement that it is maintaining a small team that will continue the game’s development.
“Today we made an incredibly difficult decision to part ways with a number of our team members while keeping a core group of developers to continue innovating on and supporting the game,” wrote the developer. “We’re proud of the team, talent, and the product we’ve created together. We’re also grateful for players who gave the game a shot, and those who continue to be a part of our community.”
One former developer—technical artist and rigger Josh Sobel—wrote a lengthy post discussing the title’s unveiling, launch, and the negativity surrounding it. Sobel also referred to Wildlight Entertainment as being “our independent, self-published, dev-led studio,” which indicates that, despite its financial investments, Tencent’s TiMi Studio Group didn’t seem to have any creative control over the development of Highguard.
Things have been looking more dire for Highguard. Despite it having hit a peak of almost 100,000 concurrent players on PC (via SteamDB) at its launch, it has since struggled to hang on to even a tenth of its player base. At the time of publishing, the PvP raid shooter saw a 24-hour peak of 1,507 players, and over the previous week, has been struggling to hit the 3,000 mark.
The future of Highguard has also been recently called into question, since the website has been unavailable all day. The studio itself hasn’t made any comment about its website being down, with its last social media post being the announcement of lay-offs from February 12th. The game’s social media account hasn’t done much since that day after having published patch notes either.
Highguard was launched on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S in January after having previously been revealed through a show-closing trailer at The Game Awards 2025. The unveiling was quite controversial, with even studio co-founder Chad Grenier referring to it as having been “maybe a little risky” in hindsight. Since then, however, Wildlight has continued to release updates for the game, including a major Episode 2 patch earlier this month.
