Wildlight Entertainment’s free-to-play shooter Highguard is finally out on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S after weeks of silence, and already, the game has almost eclipsed 100,000 concurrents on Steam.
If you check out the Most Played chart on Steam, you’ll see that Highguard is clutching the number 10 spot (97,249 current), fending off the 2023 RPG Baldur’s Gate 3 (84,313 current) at the time of this writing. It’s nowhere to be found in the PC gaming distributor’s Top Sellers chart, but that’s probably because this list tracks the best-selling games by revenue, and while Highguard’s monetization strategy is pretty standard stuff for a free-to-play game, it doesn’t appear to have set the charts on fire. There is also a year-one roadmap with an update dropping every two months starting in February.
This is surprising for the sheer fact that, until this very moment, no one really knew anything about the game. Up until it launched on January 26 for consoles and PC, there had been no combat overviews, no hero showcases, no lore explanations–nothing. And yet, despite the very little marketing–aside from popping up in the closing slot at The Game Awards on December 11–Highguard is seemingly attracting an audience. Whether that’s mild curiosity or outright fascination remains to be seen, but over 300K people are watching the game being livestreamed on Twitch right now.
