Highguard has already laid off most of its staff as fans fear shutdown

2026 is already looking bleak for new live service video games as both Highguard and 2XKO have had their teams downsized shortly after launch.

You already know how oversaturated the live service games market is. It’s got so bad it’s near impossible for any new examples to carve a sizeable enough audience and pull players away from the established names like Fortnite.

As such, there was already scepticism surrounding Highguard, the latest attempt at a PvPvE live service game, when it was shown as the final reveal at The Game Awards 2025. Despite the pedigree of its development team, who consist of former Titanfall and Apex Legends staff, it quickly became the internet’s punching bag, right up till its PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC launch on January 26.

Sadly, Highguard won’t be proving the disbelievers wrong, as it’s not even been a month since launch and most of the team at developer Wildlight Entertainment have been let go.

Senior level designer Alex Graner was the one to break the news via a LinkedIn post, where he reveals he was recently let go and is now looking for new employment.

‘Unfortunately, along with most of the team at Wildlight, I was laid off today. This one really stings as there was a lot of unreleased content I was really looking forward to that I and others designed for Highguard,’ writes Graner.

Tech artist Josh Sobel corroborates this on X, saying he was laid off ‘along with most of the staff.’

Wildlight itself has since acknowledged the layoffs although it hasn’t said how many, only commenting that, ‘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.

‘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.’

Is Highguard shutting down?

Officially, no, Highguard won’t be shutting down, at least not immediately. But it should come as no shock that many are assuming it will. Even before it came out, many made comparisons with Sony’s Concord, which infamously shut down just two weeks after launch due to poor sales and player numbers.

Unlike Concord, Highguard is completely free-to-play so there’s less of a barrier to entry, but it’s clearly struggled to retain players, at least on PC. According to SteamDB, it launched to nearly 100,000 players, but last weekend it had less than 8,000 and even less than that over the last few days.

Compare that to other hero shooters like Marvel Rivals, which has its ups and downs but has frequently attracted hundreds of thousands of players on the regular. Overwatch 2 (or just Overwatch as it’s now called), despite everything, was drawing more players than Highguard even before it saw a spike in interest, thanks to a recent overhaul.

It’s ironic when Wildlight CEO Dusty Welch told us that they were unconcerned with launch numbers during a Highguard preview event: ‘We’re in the business of delighting players and making engaging games. And I think when you realise that you’re in the entertainment business, it gets a lot easier to find the right people with the right vision going in the same direction to delight players and find something new, than to be like, ‘let’s make a business about making video games.’’

When we brought up how common it is for live service games to go under due to inflated expectations, Welch said, ‘We’re just going to keep focusing on making a great game for our players, and the rest of it will take care of itself.’

It’s quite telling that even members of the Highguard subreddit are fully expecting the game to shut down sooner rather than later.

‘Nail in the coffin was episode two/ranked which didn’t retain players driven by a suffocating new warden and ranked mode getting too sweaty for the average gamer,’ says NeverRelapseItsATrap.

ThisIsWhatLifeIs argues that Highguard needed an open beta before launch, since the core gameplay takes ‘too long to ‘get,’ while WiltedBalls jokes that the game can save itself by adding swimsuit skins.

Highguard isn’t the only example of a live service game that floundered immediately after launch. Free-to-play fighting game 2XKO only saw a full launch on January 20, after being in early access since October, and has already seen its development team downsized.

Riot Games admitted it’s simply because not enough people are playing it: ‘As we expanded from PC to console, we saw consistent trends in how players were engaging with 2XKO. The game has resonated with a passionate core audience, but overall momentum hasn’t reached the level needed to support a team of this size long term.’

However, it’s certainly not impossible for new live service games to break through and find enough of an audience to appease executives. Extraction shooter Arc Raiders has proven they don’t even need to be free-to-play.

Despite costing £30, the game has sold 14 million copies since its October 2025 launch and, according to publisher Nexon, has maintained six million active players weekly; figures the company sounds happy with.

That said, even the popular ones aren’t safe from having their teams gutted. Marvel Rivals was a smash hit when it launched in late 2024 and yet a significant number of staff, including game director Thaddeus Sasser, were let go just two months later.

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