It continues to say that between consoles and PC, “more than 2 million players” gave Highguard a shot, thanking those players who believed in what the team was trying to build. But it was made abundantly clear that many players did not believe in Highguard, and after a previous report claimed the source of the studio’s funding, Tencent, had cut Wildlight Entertainment off, the studio is officially out of financial runway to keep things going.

“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,” the statement continues. “Servers will remain online until March 12th. 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.”

Wildlight will still release some new content for Highguard before it disappears forever, giving players a chance to see a bit more of what the studio had planned before everything collapsed. The new update will arrive tomorrow if it doesn’t hit the wire later tonight, and it’ll include a new Warden, a new weapon, account level progression and skill trees. If you’re keen to play Highguard in its final hours, you can expect those patch notes to arrive soon.

The statement concludes by saying “From all of us at Wildlight, thank you for playing, for supporting us, and for being part of Highguard’s story.”

And what a story it was. We first heard about Highguard at the 2025 Game Awards, where show host and creator Geoff Keighley excitedly introduced it as the show’s closing reveal. To say the trailer did not go over well would be a huge understatement at this point, and the silence from Wildlight that followed did not do anything to help public perception about the game in the time between its reveal and launch.

Despite hitting 97K concurrent players on Steam at launch, it didn’t take long for the game’s fate to start turning negatively. Players were tearing into the game on Steam in the user reviews without even giving the game a genuine shot, not even finishing the tutorial before leaving a negative review.

As a free-to-play game that relied on microtransactions to sustain itself, once Highguard missed certain launch goals that could have kept its funding from Tencent coming, without a huge influx of players paying for the game’s battle pass and character skins, it ran out of money to keep the studio afloat almost immediately. The majority of the studio’s development team was laid off just two weeks after launch.

Releasing and sustaining a new live service shooter is arguably the most difficult thing to do right now in today’s video game industry. It’s an incredibly saturated and competitive genre, and even games with the best intentions and veteran talent struggle to make it work. It’s been upsetting to watch Highguard’s trajectory for many reasons, but mostly because the internet decided it was dead before they gave it a shot.

Some of the most successful games in the industry didn’t hit their mark right at launch. Some of them didn’t catch on for months, but they at least had the runway to do that, partly because they weren’t written off before people gave them a chance. Highguard never even got that.

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