As the free-to-play multiplayer shooter Highguard continues to sink, a new Bloomberg report based on interviews with 10 former employees of developer Wildlight Entertainment provides a closer look at where it all went so badly wrong.
The skeleton of the story is well known: A surprise reveal at the 2025 Game Awards that didn’t make a universally great impression, followed by a growing sense of confusion among followers as the studio remained stubbornly silent in its wake. The launch on January 26 attracted nearly 100,000 players, but within a couple weeks, most of them had drifted away: As I write this, fewer than 400 people are playing.
Wildlight was formed by Respawn veterans who’d worked on Apex Legends, and the Bloomberg report says studio leadership was determined to recapture the magic of that game, which shadow-dropped in 2019 with no promotional buildup and became an immediate and enduring success.
That same run silent approach for Highguard prevented external testing, and so while internal feedback was apparently all thumbs-up, some issues that may have been evident to outsiders—particularly with regard to the game’s complexity—went overlooked. Even after Highguard was revealed, the studio encouraged employees to stay quiet in the face of rising negativity and questions; instead of being actively and aggressively addressed, concerns were allowed to fester.
Highguard launched to big numbers but less than three weeks later, with roughly 90% of those players gone, Wildlight laid off most of its employees, and this is where it gets ugly. The Bloomberg report says staff thought there was enough funding to keep things going for at least a few months, giving them a change to bounce back, and lead designer Mohammad Alavi had said ahead of Highguard’s launch that it didn’t need “super huge” player counts to be successful: “What we’re really hoping for is a core group of fans that love us. That will allow us to grow.”
On February 11, however, employees were told that Tencent, which had secretly financed the project, had ended funding—a reason apparently wasn’t provided but the assumption is that continued funding was contingent upon achieving targets that Highguard never came close to—and the studio was out of money. Now, out of what was a team of 100, fewer than 20 remain.
Work is still continuing on Highguard: In fact, an update featuring a new 5v5 “Raid Rush” mode rolled out earlier today. But the response to it has been somewhat mixed because standard 3v3 raids have been disabled while the new mode is active.
Of course the bigger issue is declining player counts: As a free to play game, Highguard is dependent on players spending money on in-game items, and that is dependent on having a regular, returning player base—something it’s so far failed to accrue. As its struggles worsen, it’s only going to get tougher for Highguard to achieve that critical mass.
