Most of Highguard Studio Has Been Laid Off Says Former Dev, Wildlight Confirms Cuts

Layoffs person deed the improvement workplace Wildlight Entertainment, makers of the precocious released multiplayer shooter Highguard. This comes conscionable implicit 2 weeks aft the free-to-play game's January 26 launch.

Former elder level decorator Alex Graner posted connected LinkedIn, "Unfortunately, on with astir of the squad astatine Wildlight, I was laid disconnected today." While the fig of radical who were laid disconnected has not presently been confirmed, the studio's LinkedIn leafage states that its size is/was 51-200 employees.

Wildlight's authoritative X/Twitter relationship confirmed the layoffs with a connection reading, "Today we made an incredibly hard determination to portion ways with a fig of our squad members portion keeping a halfway radical of developers to proceed innovating connected and supporting the game."

On BlueSky, Mat Piscatella from Circana (which tracks crippled income and engagement) highlighted, "Highguard debuted successful the apical 10 successful play progressive users connected US Steam, was apical 20 connected some US PlayStation and Xbox (Circana Player Engagement Tracker week ending 1/31/26) and yet..." According to SteamDB, Highguard reached a highest concurrent subordinate number of 97,249 connected PC via Steam connected merchandise time and experienced a crisp diminution with lone 4,524 players 2 weeks aft launch.

Graner besides said, "This 1 truly stings arsenic determination was a batch of unreleased contented I was truly looking guardant to that I and others designed for Highguard." While it initially had a 3v3 competitory mode, a 5v5 mode was implemented conscionable days aft merchandise owed to subordinate reception to the tiny standard of the archetypal mode. The squad revealed a contented roadmap connected motorboat time that included updates with caller items, modes, and characters each period passim the twelvemonth packed into 7 abstracted episodes; it's unclear however the layoffs volition impact the studio's plans arsenic of now, but Widllight says it'll proceed to enactment the game.

This communicative is developing.