Wildlight Entertainment’s free-to-play raid shooter Highguard is in serious trouble. Just weeks after its January 2026 launch, the game has shed nearly 99% of its Steam player base, the studio has conducted sweeping layoffs, and its official website has vanished without warning — triggering a wave of speculation that Highguard could be on the verge of becoming the next Concord.
A Surprise Reveal That Landed With a Thud
Highguard made its public debut as the closing surprise of the December 2025 Game Awards — a coveted slot typically reserved for headline-grabbing announcements. But the warm reception Wildlight Entertainment hoped for never arrived. Viewers almost instantly labelled the game generic, with many questioning whether the market needed yet another free-to-play online-only shooter.
Despite the rocky start, the game launched in January 2026 and initially showed momentum. Highguard peaked at close to 100,000 concurrent players in its opening hours, a figure that suggested a real audience was willing to give it a chance.
From 100,000 Players to 1,600: A Collapse in Real Time
That early interest proved unsustainable. Within days of launch the player count cratered. Wildlight attempted to stem the bleeding by introducing a new 5v5 mode and rolling out balance patches, but nothing moved the needle. By early February, Highguard had barely managed a peak of around 1,600 concurrent players — a decline of roughly 98% from its opening-day high.
The game’s entirely microtransaction-based revenue model made this collapse especially dangerous. With no box-price safety net and a near-empty player pool that couldn’t sustain a functioning cosmetic economy, the financial pressure on Wildlight Entertainment was immense.
Mass Layoffs Leave a Skeleton Crew
On February 11, Wildlight Entertainment confirmed it had made significant cuts to its workforce. The studio issued a statement acknowledging the layoffs and noting that a “core group of developers” had been retained to continue supporting and developing Highguard. Game Informer The exact number of employees affected has not been publicly disclosed, though former staff have spoken out about the difficult circumstances surrounding the cuts.
A former Wildlight artist posted on social media that Highguard and its team deserved better — a sentiment echoed by others who had worked on the project. The studio, which counted veterans of Apex Legends and Titanfall among its ranks, had clearly put significant craft into the game despite its hostile commercial reception.
The Website Goes Dark — And Panic Sets In
The website outage became the trigger point for widespread shutdown speculation. In the early hours of February 17, visitors to PlayHighguard.com were met with a static screen showing the game’s logo and a line reading “This site is currently unavailable,” accompanied only by a support email address. Game Informer No explanation, no timeline, no communication from the studio.
For live-service games, a disappearing website carries heavy symbolic weight. It is often one of the first visible signs that a publisher is beginning to wind down a title’s infrastructure — and the gaming community, battle-scarred by a string of high-profile live-service failures, immediately drew the obvious comparison to Concord, Sony’s hero shooter that was shut down within two weeks of launch in 2024.
The “Concord timeline” meme spread rapidly across Reddit and X, with community members placing Highguard alongside other games that had died almost as soon as they were born. Without any word from Wildlight, worst-case speculation dominated the conversation.
A Developer Breaks Silence — But Questions Remain
Late on February 18, a developer still working at Wildlight surfaced on the game’s Discord server to address the panic. Their message confirmed the website outage was tied to a transfer and simplification process following recent changes at the studio, rather than a prelude to shutdown. GlobeNewswire The developer acknowledged the reputational damage caused by going dark and described it as a low priority given the scale of changes the team was navigating.
More significantly, the developer confirmed a new patch is in development and offered to share a preview once a date is locked in. It was a brief but concrete sign of life from a studio that had gone almost entirely quiet. Still, no patch date was given, no server status was confirmed, and no updated roadmap was offered — the studio had announced content plans running through the end of 2026 at launch, and whether that schedule survives remains an open question.
Is There a Path Back? The No Man’s Sky Question
Some observers have pointed to No Man’s Sky as a cautionary tale with an optimistic ending. Hello Games faced a near-universally hostile reception at launch in 2016, went dark for months, and then rebuilt the game into one of gaming’s most celebrated redemption arcs. Could Highguard follow the same path?
The circumstances are meaningfully different. Hello Games was a small, privately funded studio that owned its IP and could reinvest launch revenue into continued development while quietly rebuilding. Wildlight’s financial picture is murkier — as a free-to-play title, there is no confirmed launch revenue to draw on, and the scale of layoffs suggests the resources available to the remaining team are considerably more constrained. Reports in February 2026 also revealed that TiMi Studio Group, a subsidiary of Tencent, had been the undisclosed primary financial backer of Highguard Game Rant — a detail that raises further questions about what ongoing support, if any, the studio can expect.
Bottom Line: Still Alive, But the Clock Is Ticking
As of February 19, 2026, Highguard remains online and playable across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox. A patch is reportedly in development. The website outage appears to be a logistical consequence of the studio restructuring rather than the start of an end-of-service process.
But the numbers tell a sobering story. A 98% player drop in under a month, mass layoffs, a vanished website, and a skeleton crew communicating through Discord do not paint a picture of a healthy live-service game. The weeks ahead — and whether that promised patch actually arrives — will be telling. For now, Highguard is still alive. Whether it stays that way is the question the gaming world is watching closely.
