Highguard is dead – and the internet’s happy

Debora Pape

5.3.2026

Translation: Patrik Stainbrook

After a mere six weeks, studio Wildlight is pulling the plug on its shooter hopeful Highguard. But as the game dies, a section of the gaming community is celebrating its demise with appalling malice and personal insults.

Call time of death: free-to-play PvP shooter Highguard is being buried just a few weeks after its release. On X, developer studio Wildlight announced its servers would be shut down on 12 March.

Almost in defiance, Wildlight is releasing one last content update beforehand. Among other extras, it’s adding a new playable hero and a new weapon. However, there’s not much time left to try them out. Still, at least the update proves that the team, as promised, continued to work on the game after its 26 January release, apparently hoping to turn the tide.

In the comments under the shutdown announcement, I mainly encountered malice and hatred – scary. I don’t think any studio deserves this, even if it’s responsible for serious operational and communication blunders.

On 12 February, the game had 3,123 simultaneous active players according to SteamDB. That day, the studio announced on X that it had to lay off numerous employees. According to reports, only around 20 developers remained. It was only a matter of time before the game would be discontinued or the studio dissolved, even.

Check out the article below to find out why Highguard had such a poor standing from the start and lost almost its entire playerbase:

Wildlight Entertainment is an independent studio without a corporation like Sony backing it. Although Chinese megacorporation Tencent invested in the development of the game, the studio still bears the risk alone. On 23 February, the number of players fell below 1,000. After 1 March, it never rose above 500. Apparently, Wildlight saw no way of keeping the game running after all by this point and pulled the plug.

With this, Highguard has followed the same path as Concord. That live-service game was also discontinued almost instantly due to a lack of players. Soon thereafter, developer studio Firewalk, owned by Sony, was shuttered.

You can’t really pin this disaster on any one thing. The studio naturally bears a large part of the blame, beginning with the idea of releasing a game into the already saturated live-service landscape. It may well be that Highguard never had a chance of finding its own niche anyway due to the strong competition. Any way you slice it, the servers would’ve been shut down and the developers out of a job.

Regardless, plenty of haters clearly don’t care either way whether the game is good or bad. They just see a fitting target that everyone’s bashing and use it to stand out with even more creative hate speech.

Every scrap of communication from the studio is met with malicious memes and spiteful comments. Even the announcement of the game’s cancellation was inundated with McDonald’s memes, suggesting where the development team might find work in the future. After all, it’s not like those evil devs deserve any better, right?

As a gamer and community member, I’m ashamed of the way some of us treat our fellow humans. Oversaturated market or not, Highguard is a real game with real people, real ideas and real work behind it.

I understand why a suspected scam game like The Day Before from the now-closed studio Fntastic would be met with such resentment. But in contrast to Fntastic, Wildlight wasn’t motivated by fraudulent intentions.

Quite the opposite: during early preview phases, the studio received positive feedback regarding the quality of the core gameplay. It’s also the reason why Geoff Keighley, host of the Game Awards, offered the studio the prestigious final trailer slot on his show. And yet, the studio and its employees are being smothered in a shitstorm that’s second to none.

Serenity over Schadenfreude

I struggle to believe that Highguard flopped because of «bad devs». Very few negative reviews mention bugs or crashes. People like you and I worked on the game: devs who (probably) tried their best, who stood behind their game and hoped a lot of people would enjoy it. They still need to pay rent and provide for their family. And they have feelings too. Constructive criticism, even harshly phrased, is one thing. Purely badmouthing a product and insults, however, are quite another.

Former Wildlight developer Josh Sobel also posted about this on his now deactivated X account. You can read about his experience in this article – scary.

According to him, the team enjoyed working on their creation prior to the Game Awards and was convinced they were on the right track. Then everything changed. Sobel reports that his colleagues deliberately avoided social media due to previous experiences.

Sobel lacked this experience, so he faced the full brunt of the hatred. After setting his X account to private to stem the flood of messages, content creators described this protective measure as cowardly. Others bemoaned the evergreen woke agenda as a reason for the game’s flop due to Sobel’s autism.

Messages like these do something to those they affect. If you don’t want to face something similar yourself, don’t do it to others either. I wish my fellow gamers would show more composure. Not everything has to be thrashed in public. If the market’s saturated or a game doesn’t deliver, it’ll flop organically. There’s no need to pray for a developer’s downfall because of this. Above all else, kicking people while they’re already down is anything but a positive character trait.

Debora Pape

Editor

Debora.Pape@galaxus.de

Feels just as comfortable in front of a gaming PC as she does in a hammock in the garden. Likes the Roman Empire, container ships and science fiction books. Focuses mostly on unearthing news stories about IT and smart products.

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