Following its appearance as The Game Awards 2025 “One More Thing” announcement, Highguard was always going to face an uphill struggle. One developer said the game was “turned into a joke from minute one,” but further post-mortems revealed deeper issues. Poor playtesting and limited modes were cited as two reasons for the game’s rapid downfall. Within days, most of the Wildlight Entertainment team were laid off, and within just a month, it was shut down.
That shutdown happened today, with Wildlight officially switching the servers off at 11 am PST, but any hopes of the game receiving a Club Penguin-style send-off were quickly dashed, as only 399 players were present at the time of closure.
Nobody Came To Highguard’s Farewell Party
Okay, so there was no actual farewell party, and Wildlight Entertainment effectively just pulled the plug on the servers, but we’ve seen other instances where players congregate to celebrate a game’s last moments.
Club Penguin had arguably the most famous send-off, with hundreds of penguins returning to say goodbye to the beloved browser game, but games like Anthem, Final Fantasy 14 (in its first iteration), and The Matrix Online all got some kind of fan send-off.
Sadly, there was no such send-off for Highguard. Just hours before the shutdown, the player count dropped below 200, and as the server closure drew closer, the game only had 399 players on PC. Of course, Wildlight studio head Chad Grenier did reveal that PlayStation 5 was, by far, the game’s most popular platform, so it could have gotten a bigger send-off there, but at least on PC, it was sad.
It’s a sad reflection on the game, which always looked destined to fail. In a time where more high-quality games are releasing, audiences are demanding fresh, new experiences, and another triple-A, Games-as-a-Service looter-shooter certainly isn’t that. You’d like to think this, plus 2023’s Concord (and all the other live-service games that hemorrhaged players last year), would teach decision-makers at big development studios a lesson to stop chasing trends, but something tells me that for as long as C-suite execs exist, the trend-chasing will continue.
- Released
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January 26, 2026
- Developer(s)
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Wildlight Entertainment
- Publisher(s)
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Wildlight Entertainment
- Multiplayer
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Online Multiplayer
- Cross-Platform Play
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Full
