Do Wildlight Staff Cuts Spell The Death Knell For Highguard?
Wildlight Entertainment, the team behind Highguard, has confirmed it has laid off most of the game’s development team. It has not confirmed the exact number of people laid off, but has said that it will retain a core team of developers to continue developing the game.
Although the developer has said Highguard will not be shuttering, its player numbers are hugely disappointing for a live-service game – 100,000 people played the game on release day, but that has dropped to less than 4,000 peak players per day now.
An Unconvincing Start
Highguard didn’t get off to a great start. Nobody really knew about the game before its announcement at the end of the 2025 Game Awards – a spot usually reserved for a major game drop. It might have fared better if it had been shadow-dropped, which the studio itself had planned.
And, while it isn’t strictly a hero shooter, it is effectively sharing the same space. Which means it has been pitted against Apex Legends, Valorant, and Overwatch. Arguably, it is also up against titles like Rainbow Six: Siege and Team Fortress 2. Unfortunately, that grand reveal, and indeed the game itself, turned out to be a bit lacklustre to compete.
On launch, the game was panned for its map design and 3v3 format, with players complaining that games felt empty.
Will It Recover?
Wildlight did take action to try to improve things. Most notably, it added a 5v5 game type, which appeased a lot of early players, but even that hasn’t helped the game arrest its player number slide.
Its performance has been compared to Concord. Launched in August 2024, Concord was a hero shooter that is only remembered for how pathetically it performed. Servers were shut down after two weeks, and Sony refunded its approximately 25,000 buyers.
Other games have recovered from disastrous starts. The two most cited examples are No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk. That so many developers have been laid off suggests Wildlight is taking a minimalist approach, rather than trying to stage any kind of recovery.
No Man’s Sky Redemption Arc
No Man’s Sky was seriously hyped before its August 2016 launch, when it saw a peak of over 210,000 Steam players. But by September, that figure had already dropped to less than 10,000.
However, developer Hello Games has fixed bugs and launched almost countless updates and improvements, creating what is now considered an excellent game.
It currently has a player count of more than 20,000, with sizeable peaks when new updates launch. That isn’t bad for a 10-year-old game that was written off when it launched.
Cyberpunk 2077 Bounce
Cyberpunk 2077 launched in December 2020 and had more than a million Steam players. But it was seriously buggy, with most players and even developers agreeing the game had launched before being complete.
A few months later, the player count was down to 20,000.
CD Projekt Red stuck with it, though, fixing bugs and launching some very well-received DLC. Today, it averages around 60,000 peak monthly players.
Wildlight Staff Cuts Part Of Highguard’s Ongoing Struggle
However, these two games had distinct advantages over Highguard. They could launch additional content in the form of DLCs and had obvious bugs and glitches that needed fixing.
By contrast, Highguard could release new maps and some new heroes. It has already added 5v5 games. Ultimately, though, it can’t do much to improve gameplay. And there isn’t anything inherently bad about the gameplay – it’s just a bit unoriginal.
Wildlight has previously said it has a year’s content basically ready to go, so they will likely try to stick it out for that long. But, they’re stuck in a loop. Dismal player numbers mean poor matchmaking quality, which will put even more early adopters off, and that will only get worse. The Wildlight staff cuts certainly aren’t a positive sign.
