Highguard is Shutting Down March 12 - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 03 March 2026 / 3,096 Views
Developer Wildlight Entertainment announced Highguard will be shutting down on March 12. This is just a month and a half after the free-to-play player-versus-player raid shooter released.
This isn't a big surprise given the developer laid off the majority of its staff last month with just a small team remaining on to continue to support the game.
"Today we’re sharing difficult news," reads the update from the developer. "We have made the decision to permanently shut down Highguard on March 12.
"Since launch, more than two million players stepped into Highguard‘s world. You shared feedback, created content, and many believed in what we were building. For that, we are deeply grateful.
"Despite the passion and hard work of our team, we have not been able to build a sustainable player base to support the game long term. Servers will remain online until March 12. We hope you’ll jump in with us one more time to show your support and get those final great matches in while we still can.
"The team is excited to release one final game update to enjoy in the remaining life of the game. We’ll be adding a new Warden, a new weapon, account level progression, and skill trees! Full patch notes are coming, and we’re targeting tonight or tomorrow morning for patch release.
"From all of us at Wildlight, thank you for playing, for supporting us, and for being part of Highguard‘s story."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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Without all the drama surrounding it, the game would have died even faster.
interesting. you think all the drama and discourse actually helped it get some recognition that it wouldn't have had otherwise?
Absolutely. The drama made the game the talk of of the town. It was not in a positive way, but still, it was a free to play game, the more people knowing about it, the more people will install it out of curiosity. If this had launched without fanfare, they wouldn't have gotten even those downloads.
It does seem to be that the layoffs were inevitable. they were going to rely on a shadowdrop because they didn't have the money to do marketing. And Geoff believed he was doing them a huge favor.
What amazes me is how quickly games are deemed failures now. They must be looking at tax write offs now.
ROFL. chasing a trend and dies. Devs told how toxic the workplace was similar to Concord. Ego fuels failure.
online discourse has become really powerful. As soon as your game gets labelled "uncool" people stop wanting to play it and then it goes viral and then no-one does. It's also become cool in gaming culture to crap on live service games. Helldivers and arc raiders were spared from this attack but Highguard, Marathon, and Concord are getting blasted to a very extreme degree.
Or it was just a boring game that people weren't interested in... If it was actually enticing, people would have played it.
That's always possible but with the amount of hate being thrown at these games it really feels like the console wars all over again, just a different variant of it.
I feel like a lot games that get thrashed online can go on to be very successful. The recent pokemon games have had overwhelming negativity online but are now the 2nd and 3rd best selling games in the franchise
That's Pokemon though, sheer power of the biggest entertainment franchise ever.
The amount of negativity from audiences is outright weird though. None of the games Hardstuck mentioned are bad games but so far, the first 2 were run of the mill and that didn't help. Marathon is following a trend but I think it will do well as it has Bungie backing and certainly doesn't look generic. Like what makes Arc Raiders worthy of praise but not Marathon, really?
This really isn't about live service trend chasing because for every time people complain about it and not having their single player games, a generic chasing the trend live service game like Arc Raiders sells 14 mil in 4 months, while critically acclaimed, beloved Nier Automata sells 10 million in a decade. How many has game of the years E33 and Astro Bot sold compared to Arc Raiders?
I don't think gaming audiences know what they want.
Pretty much it, games are going from being uninteresting to people actively rooting they crash and burn and studios get closed, you can see it in this comment section just as well, it was the top post before I liked yours.
What does Helldivers 2 or Arc Riders did that much better that made them a huge success? To the point of other ones closing in a month?
Concord had really bad and bland designs, why hate it tho? Why be happy it failed?
Highguard was made by the devs of a hugely popular game in the same style as Apex Legends, why was one so extremely popular and the other make people actually happy it's a massive failure?
Online discourse is so powerful that it literally brainwash people, politics are actively making use of it every single day to steer public opinion to the point of reality not being able to keep up with parody nowdays, people in the USA can see it very close to themselves, official government veihicles used as propaganda lobby, where even if you bomb and kill someone the online discourse can be steered to you being the victim while spearheading the offensive at the same time, I literally just read, right now, a woman post that disliking Donald Trump meant disliking Jesus Christ.
Quality is not the reason many things fail, certain not when the hate is so unproportional to it. A mediocre games bombs and is forgotten, not cheered like a victory by a whole lot of people.
Brand recognition and extremely high quality can still hold it to some degree, but online discourse is extremely powerful.
I'll never forget how a huge streamer started playing Astro Bot live after internet started calling it GOTY win a robbery, with the clear intent of actively looking for reasons to dislike and mock it to justify the discourse, but was baffled by how good it was and he couldn't hate on it no matter how hard he tried, imagine if it was just a good game, not a truly excellent one, the guy and his massive following would keep shitting on it despite it still being a good game, it took it being a masterpiece for him to be unnable to mold the discourse as previously desired.
Internet is beyond cooked.
Beautifully said. I am anxiously awaiting the release of Marathon on Thursday to see if they can turn that into "concord 3" and celebrate the possible failure of that game too.
Helldivers had some post launch internet discourse, and yet it's still thriving after 2 years. The difference is that HD2 provides its players with a focused game-play vision that's fun and entertaining even after hundreds of hours. Admittedly, I did not play Highguard (PvP FPS games are not my thing), but from what I've read of the concept, it sounded like a mess of ideas thrown together and half-baked.
Nothing about it stood out, at least not to the point it needed to, to pull players from games of a similar nature such as Overwatch, Marvel Rivals, etc. It's just the nature of the beast for present day live service games. You can't release something that is just 'okay' when players have already been investing in other games that are 'good'/'great'.
I would agree that the dogpiling negativity is a bit excessive, but I think this is a compounding result of the declining quality (on the whole) of AAA gaming over the years. At the end of the day, Concord and Highguard failed to present something of interest to the players, so the players decided not to invest their time and money, simple as that.
I mean, we could speculate one way or the other. Half the players are on the PS5 and based on reactions we saw, that side was rather dismissive of the PC players discourse (quite frankly, with good reason, since their problem stemmed from their inability to read). So a sizable number of gamers would have still be around, then word of mouth would spread once things subsided, and PC players would come back.
It all loops back to the gameplay speaking for itself, it's an overall well crafted experience. If a game is worth playing, people will play it, no amount of online bitching from a vocal minority is going to change that.
Everything about this game was sad
They rly need to stop chasing that Live Service almost endless money income. It wont happen for 98.9% of developers. Just make good story driven solo games. As BraLoD said i dont see Horizon doing any better then this. People want to own their games and they want to be able to play these games 10 years from now (if Steam is still alive).
As someone who would put both Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West as some of my top favorite games ever, I can tell you that I have zero interest in Hunters Gathering. Like, zero. That the majority of Guerilla Games is working on it makes me really sad - like I am hoping and praying that this live service failure in the making does not sink the studio... :(
People are gonna pretend it was a failure even though it thrived for weeks compared to Concord.
The biggest problem for Highguard was not all the attention, it was that it did not have a beta period to flesh out its ideals and check the community to see what works and what doesn't. Now of course with all the attention, it needed to come out swinging which it did not and the industry has way to many of these types of games that are already polished that releasing in this industry without that polish was certain death. lesson learned for everyone.
At least Geoff liked the game... and killed the game as well
It did become Concord 2 afterall.
Things are brutal nowdays. That Horizon game will have a hard time doing well too, it seems.
