Two weeks ago, Wildlight Entertainment launched Highguard, a game that many in the video game community were unsure of following its reveal at The Game Awards. The game was off to strong start, all things considered, with nearly 100,000 concurrent players trying the game out on Steam. Circana also reported that it was part of the top 20 games in weekly active users on both PlayStation and Xbox. The momentum did not last. With mixed user reviews on Steam after launch, the game’s concurrent player count dipped. By February, the count reached fewer than 5,000, even though there was a recent large content drop. Now, after several developers revealed that they were let go from the team, Wildlight released an official statement confirming layoffs at the studio.
Before the statement, former Highguard Level Designer Alex Graner revealed the layoffs on LinkedIn. “Unfortunately, along with most of the team at Wildlight, I was laid off today. 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.
Wildlight noted that a core group of developers will continue innovating and supporting the game. We’ll have to wait and see whether or not that leads to new content. Based on Garner’s post, that doesn’t seem to be the case.