It’s happened again. Highguard, the latest free-to-play live service first-person shooter to enter the fray, this time from developer Wildlight Entertainment, a team made up of former Apex Legends and Titanfall 2 developers, launched just two weeks ago on January 26, 2026. Today, February 11, 2026, a little more than two weeks since launch, the studio confirmed it had a round of layoffs.

Individual developers across multiple branches, including principal and senior members of staff, shared the news on their LinkedIn accounts before the studio made a statement of its own on the official Wildlight Entertainment X (formerly Twitter) account.

“Today we made an incredibly difficult decision to part ways with a number of our team members while keeping a core group of developers to continue innovating on and supporting the game,” the studio’s statement begins. “We’re proud of the team, talent, and the product we’ve created together. We’re also grateful for our players who gave the game a shot, and those who continue to be part of our community.”

Though Wildlight doesn’t provide an exact figure, at least two of the developers who shared they had been impacted described it as “most“ of the team getting cut, with all of their statements really driving home the tragedy of the situation.

“Today I was laid off from my job at Wildlight along with most of the staff,” writes lead tech artist, Josh Sobel. “It was the best team I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve never put so much of myself into a project before. I wouldn’t trade the past 2.5+ years for anything. I’m still spinning, and I won’t be in a place to start thinking about the future for a while, but please keep me in mind if, in the near future, you’re looking for a senior or higher level rigger.”

It’s clear that Highguard did not land how Wildlight wanted it to. The studio leadership’s decision to slot it into The Game Awards with a trailer that, unfortunately, did not properly convey what the game is to players, followed by complete silence, into an attempt at making it a shadow-dropped hit left players with nothing but confusion going into it and a skeptical approach when servers were turned on.

Once the game was live and a few of the game’s more glaring cracks were shown, those who tuned in at launch dropped it like a lead balloon. The studio’s leaders apologized for how the launch was handled while players on Steam were relentless, showering Highguard with negative reviews.

To the studio’s credit, it acted quickly to try and address player feedback, adding a 5v5 mode to ratchet up the intensity as players complained about boring matches, but that hasn’t turned things around fast enough for Wildlight’s leadership and bean counters. The only thing that has changed about Highguard in an instant is the size of the team working on it, which ultimately only makes it more difficult for the studio to try and put a better foot forward than what they brought to launch.

Sobel isn’t the only one who describes their team or their time at Wildlight with such high praise, and it all makes you wonder why this keeps happening. Why studios are spun up and formed in a way that is continually deemed to be unsustainable without serious cuts to the only thing of real value a new studio has: its team.

It’s not impossible for Wildlight to turn things around. We’ve seen studios do it before. But it is now beyond tiring to still see studios invest so much effort, time, and money in games where everything rests on the hope that it’ll be the next Fortnite, and if it doesn’t hit that mark right away, cut to plan B of laying off as many people as possible and hope you can become the next No Man’s Sky.

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