Barely a month after it released, Wildlight Entertainment has announced that their raid shooter Highguard will be shut down next week on March 12th.
After recently laying off staff, Wildlight Entertainment had most of its funding reportedly pulled by Tencent as the studio struggled to retain players after its January 31st release. In their announcement Wildlight said, «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.» They elaborate that over 2 million players had tried Highguard, and that servers will remain open until March 12th.
Additionally, there will be one final update released today or tomorrow for players to «enjoy in the remaining life of the game.» This new update will include a new Warden, a new weapon, account level progression, and skill trees. The patch notes are forthcoming today, before the release.
Created by former Respawn Interactive developers, Highguard burst onto the scene at The Game Awards 2025 as the final announcement done to close out the show. Lack of communication over the next month led to many theories until the game launched, where it quickly grabbed players interested in seeing what it was about, hitting a peak of over 97k players at launch. It lacked the ability to retain it, and rumors of its death quickly struck following layoffs, and when its website shut down a couple weeks ago for a limited time.
The borrowed life was not for long, however, as Highguard will be dead inside of 2 months of its release. This is not the shortest lifespan for a live service game in recent memory, but it will join mentions with titles like Concord on the dangers of releasing live service games, and how difficult it is for those games to survive. Lacking the parent company like Concord had, at this point there is no announced plans for refunds.
