Highguard

Highguard is a free-to-play PvP raid shooter developed by Wildlight Entertainment, a studio founded by veterans of Apex Legends, Titanfall, and Call of Duty, set in a fantasy world where teams of arcane gunslingers called Wardens fight for control of a mythical continent.

Matches followed a multi-phase loop: players first scavenged an open-world zone for resources, weapons, and gear on horseback, then competed for possession of a legendary sword called the Shieldbreaker before using it to breach and destroy the enemy's fortified base.

The game blended hero abilities, mounted combat, and destructible environments into what critics described as a genuinely novel, if unpolished and overly complex, shooter concept that never got the time it needed to develop into what its creators envisioned.

Highguard's collapse was swift but not entirely surprising. Despite launching as the final world premiere reveal at The Game Awards 2025, a slot reserved for major titles, the reveal trailer landed poorly, and the studio went almost entirely silent on social media for the following month, compounding early skepticism. When the game launched on January 26, it opened to a respectable peak of nearly 97,000 concurrent Steam players, but player counts dropped 90% within a week, quickly rendering the free-to-play monetization model unsustainable. By mid-February it had fewer than 500 daily players on Steam, falling below decade-old games like Call of Duty (2003) in revenue rankings.

The critical blow came from behind the scenes. Just 16 days after launch, Tencent, the studio's primary financial backer, withdrew its funding following the game's soft launch performance. With no external capital remaining, Wildlight had no choice but to lay off the majority of its staff almost immediately, leaving only a skeleton crew to keep the servers running. Developers later stated they were blindsided by the layoffs, having expected at least several months to iterate on the game. The studio's own website went down shortly after, with a developer noting on Discord that fixing it was a low priority because the reputational damage had already occurred.

On March 3, 2026, Wildlight officially announced the shutdown, confirming servers would go offline on March 12, just 45 days after release. In a final gesture, the studio released one last patch adding a new Warden, a new weapon, skill trees, and account-level progression, features many felt should have been present at launch. Fewer than 20 employees remained at the studio by the time of closure, and no future projects have been announced.