After less than six weeks, developer Wildlight has announced it is shutting down its free-to-play hero shooter Highguard.
Highguard will “permanently shut down” on 12th March, Wildlight has said today.
“Since launch, more than two million players stepped into Highguard’s world. You shared feedback, created content, and many believed in what we were building. For that, we are deeply grateful,” Wildlight said in a post on social media.
“Despite the passion and hard work of our team, we have not been able to build a sustainable player base to support the game long term. Servers will remain online until March 12th. We hope you’ll jump in with us one more time to show your support and get those final great matches in while we still can.”
Highguard closed out The Game Awards 2025, with a trailer introducing us all to a world of battling Wardens and their magical mounts. The game then launched in January, and quickly had a large influx of players on its release. But there were a few complaints as well, with many disappointed with areas such as map size and the 3v3 game format. The studio sought to address these issues with a number of content updates and patches, while also making its once-limited-time 5v5 mode a permanent feature. However, this was not enough, and dwindling player numbers have ultimately resulted in Wildlight deciding to cut its losses, and pull the plug on Highguard.
Ahead of the shut down, Wildlight is releasing one last update, which will add a new Warden, a new weapon, account level progression, and skill trees. We can expect full patch notes in the coming day or so, along with the update’s release.
“From all of us at Wildlight, thank you for playing, for supporting us, and for being part of Highguard’s story,” the studio closed.
In a separate post, Highguard’s game director Chad Grenier was asked why the team was not going to support the game for longer. To this, he replied: “Not enough revenue to keep anyone employed to work on it, unfortunately.”
Resharing today’s news, Grenier also offered some player stats for the ill-fated shooter. According to Grenier, the average play session lasted 91 minutes. “This is actually quite good,” Highguard’s director said, stating “the average games played per session was 3.48 matches per session”.
Meanwhile, most recent stats revealed PlayStation had the biggest playerbase, ahead of Xbox and then Steam. Scarlet was the most picked character “by a good margin” (also, once upon a time she was called Skye, while Kai was called Jade before launch).
As for how games ended, most were due to a generator exploding. Its most popular mode, meanwhile, was 3v3.
Grenier added the US was Highguard’s biggest player base, followed by Japan. Highguard’s director added “92 percent of people who loaded the game for the first time, completed the training mission”. This is “actually a very healthy number,” he said, “similar to what we saw at launch with Apex training completion”.
Earlier this month, it was reported Tencent pulled funding from Wildlight just two weeks after Highguard’s launch. Staff were called to an all-hands meeting, and then told that there would be layoffs as Highguard had seemingly failed to meet whatever metrics Tencent had for it.
Wildlight publicly confirmed layoffs a day later, but wouldn’t specify numbers. At this time, it was said “a core group of developers” would remain at the studio to work on the game.
