Designer claims ‘most’ of Highguard’s dev team have been laid off, weeks after launch
The shooter enjoyed a strong start, but player numbers appear to have dropped
A designer has claimed that “most” of the team behind free-to-play shooter Highguard has been laid off, weeks after it launched.
Alex Graner, a designer who’s worked on Apex Legends and Battlefield 6, made the claim in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday. The post was shared by multiple other Highguard developers, including audio director Brad Snyder, and producer Amélia Almeida.
VGC has asked Wildlight Entertainment for comment.
“Unfortunately, along with most of the team at Wildlight, I was laid off today,” he wrote. “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.”
Highguard, the debut game from Wildlight Entertainment, was announced with great fanfare at the close of December’s The Game Awards. Developed by veterans of the hero shooter genre, the game combines FPS mechanics with rideable mounts and ‘raid’ mechanics, with teams tasked with breaching each other’s bases.
After weeks of silence, it launched as a free-to-play title for PC and consoles on January 26 and appeared to enjoy a strong start. The game initially attracted nearly 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, and entered the top 20 games in weekly active users on both US PlayStation and Xbox platforms, according to Circana.
However, the game received mixed user reviews on Steam after launch, and by February, Highguard’s concurrent players had dropped to fewer than 5,000, despite a recent large content drop.
California-based Wildlight Entertainment includes veterans from Respawn who worked on the Apex Legends and Titanfall franchises, as well as former Call of Duty developers. According to LinkedIn, the company has over 100 employees.
Wildlight had detailed a year of post-launch content for Highguard and launched the game’s second ‘episode’, with new maps and items, just last week.
With the majority of consumers entranced in big, established live service games like Fortnite and Call of Duty, new live service launches like Highguard are riskier than ever, especially with the millions in investment required to build them and their post-launch roadmaps.
The most notable failed launch in recent years was Sony’s Concord, which was shut down two weeks after its launch, despite significant investment from PlayStation.
Speaking to Polygon ahead of launch, Wildlight’s studio head, Chad Grenier, claimed that he wasn’t concerned about reaching large player numbers. “Whether it gets a thousand people or a hundred million people, it doesn’t matter. What matters most is that the game is loved by the people who played it,” he said.
In the same interview, CEO Dusty Welch shot down the notion of “shooter fatigue” among players. “The metrics, the data shows there’s more play time with more monetization happening… Shooters as a category continue to be the rocket fuel that propels the gaming space.”
