After just 45 days since its official launch, the PvP raid shooter, Highguard, developed by Wildlight Entertainment, is officially shutting down its servers effective today on all platforms. This news comes after the game’s announcement at last year’s Game Awards and weeks after Wildlight Entertainment laid off hundreds of employees in an effort to keep the game alive. However, it seems no matter what Wildlight Entertainment did, it just wasn’t enough. Here’s what we know about Highguard shutting down its servers on all platforms.
Wildlight Entertainment Lays Off Hundreds of Employees
To give some context, a couple of weeks ago, it was reported that hundreds of employees at Wildlight Entertainment were laid off, in the midst of several updates and changes to the game requested by players. The news of this was pretty shocking, given how abrupt the mass layoffs were. After Highguard’s release, the devs also revealed a content roadmap, which would include updates with new items, modes, and characters each month, as well as seven separate new episodes to the storyline.
Obviously, the layoffs and the game’s shutdown were not in the plans for Wildlight Entertainment. I can even go as far as to say that the decision to shut down the game was also abrupt. The mass layoffs probably had something to do with this decision, which really is a shame given how much work and energy were put into this PvP raid shooter, and what we could’ve experienced in Highguard had the devs been able to complete the game’s roadmap.
Wildlight Entertainment also reported that Highguard attracted 2 million players across all of its supported platforms during launch; however, the game quickly lost player interest. Apart from the mass layoffs, this has also contributed to the game’s shutdown. Even with veteran devs on the Highguard team, such as Dusty Welch and Jason McCord, who’ve worked on popular titles like Apex Legends and Titanfall, Highguard couldn’t live up to the hype or sustain it.
Highguard Shuts Down Servers Effective March 12
Highguard has now effectively shut down all of its servers across all available platforms today. Even after Highguard coveted the final spot during last year’s Game Awards new game announcements, and an explosive launch, seeing over 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, there’s been so much difficulty the game has experienced since releasing a month and a half ago. Highhuard also joins Concord, The Day Before, and Radical Heights, other titles that were shut down weeks after their own launch.
Over the past month and a half, since the game’s launch, Highguard has seen a steady and exponential decrease in player count. This has led to a lot of speculation online that the game wouldn’t last and would eventually shut down; however, news of the shutdown was really abrupt. An interesting point to point out was the fact that Wildlight had released an update for the game just last week, which introduced a brand-new skill tree, allowing players to build out their upgrades in four distinct playstyles, as well as the addition of a new Warden, a new weapon, and account progression.
This tells us that Wildlight had every intention to keep the game running even after the layoffs, so the shutdown feels even crazier, after just 45 days. Earlier this month, Wildlight Entertainment announced that the servers for Highguard would be shut down on March 12, which is today. The game has been removed from digital storefronts, such as Steam and the PlayStation Store. This unfortunate event serves as a reminder that space in this industry is limited and success is never guaranteed, no matter how bright things may seem at first.
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