Image credit: Wildlight Entertainment
You have just under a week left to play Highguard. Wildlight Entertainment’s PvP raid shooter launched with a ton of momentum, but it couldn’t maintain it. Despite a solid enough premise, the live-service shooter couldn’t make a dent in the market, and so it dies a swift and painful death.
Highguard is yet another victim of the Games-as-a-Service trap, where developers want to keep you on the hook rather than provide an encompassing, enjoyable experience. However, it’s 2026 now, and not 2016. The market is oversaturated, people are wising up, and here I am writing the game’s obituary.
Highguard died a brutal death
There’s no denying the momentum that Highguard managed to achieve at first; Wildlight’s shooter came storming out of the gate with over 97,000 players logging in and playing the game. Impressive, sure, but the title lost half its player base overnight and never recovered.
Less than 24 hours later, fewer than 40,000 players were experiencing Highguard. A day later, it halved again to less than 20,000. By the start of Highguard‘s second week online, on February 2, 2026, just over 10,000 players remained; just 10% of players who gave it a go to begin with.
The month that followed was agonizing for Wildlight. On February 12, 2026, the studio announced layoffs, cutting the team down to a “core group of developers to continue innovating on and supporting the game”. At this time, there were only around 3,000 people playing on Steam.
By the end of February, it was reported that fewer than 20 developers remained working on Highguard. It is said that the initial team consisted of 100 people, all of whom were cut due to the game’s staggering decline in popularity. Unsurprisingly, the studio announced its shuttering of Highguard this week, with services concluding on March 12, 2026.
There was nothing new or special about Highguard
There’s no faulting Wildlight for trying to create footing in an already crowded space, even if no one wanted what it was offering. From launch day, the game introduced its War Chests, a take on traditional battle passes, which offered a suite of cosmetic items; new character and weapon skins, charms, emotes, and banners.
How do you hook people? You make the first one free. The first War Chest, Pit Fighters, included 44 items, and was meant to entise people into spending real-world money. These battle passes were supposed to cost 900 Highguard Gold (around $9), and would feature “tiers” of items you would unlock by playing matches.
Sounds fine in theory, sure, but the main problem here is that Highguard’s cosmetics were generic and uninspired. While Wildlight was clearly vying for a slice of the action seen from the likes of Overwatch, Warframe, and Fortnite, but was never going to get far with the items it had on offer.
You’ll forget about Highguard‘s characters and weapons as soon as you look away from them. Una, Redmane, and Atticus received gladiatorial “Legendary Skins”, which weren’t much more than their already uninspired base designs. There was a bear, though, so credit where it’s due, maybe we remember this as the “bear shooter” retroactively.
Highguard weapon names and designs did not inspire confidence. Viper, Kraken, Vanguard, Rocket Launcher, Longhorn, Beast Hammer… yawn. The Zipline gun was a fun addition, though, working similarly to what we’ve seen from Just Cause, adding an easy traversal method around the map, for all that was worth.
Yet another live-service game for the scrap heap
Even Highguard‘s failure isn’t unique to it. It’s a story we’ve seen countless times over the last 10 years. Wildlight’s shooter is yet another live-service game which peaked, offered little of substance, and then fell off at light speed.
The live-service graveyard is filling up, and the bodies are piling high. Highguard joins the collective miasma of Anthem, Babylon’s Fall, Battleborn, Concord, Crucible, Hyperscape, LawBreakers, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Skull and Bones, and countless others.
We’re now (finally) starting to see a shift where people are prioritizing their time, and moving away from GaaS slop like this. Goodnight, Highguard, we did not know you. I, for one, will shed no tears.
FAQs
Wildlight Entertainment has confirmed that Highguard will go offline on March 12, 2026.
Reviews for the shooter were solid, and peopled seemed entertained enough by it, even if it didn’t hold ground for long.
Yes, it was described as a “PvP raid shooter” with a 3v3 format.
