Highguard Studio Wildlight Has Fewer Than 20 Developers Left After Devastating Layoffs

Wildlight Entertainment, the studio behind the free-to-play raid shooter Highguard, reportedly has fewer than 20 people left to keep the game going. This comes from a Bloomberg report by Jason Schreier, who spoke to 10 former employees about what went so badly wrong.

The answer, according to those developers? "Hubris."

The Rise of Wildlight

Founded in 2021 by Respawn veterans, including Apex Legends design director Jason McCord and COO Dusty Welch, Wildlight set out to do it all over again. The studio attracted strong talent and, as Bloomberg now confirms, secret backing from Tencent. The goal was a live-service game with Rust-style survival mechanics.

Two years in, that design wasn't working. The team pivoted to a more competitive structure, streamlining the survival crafting into what became Highguard's "raid shooter" format. Remnants of the original design stayed in, though, leaving the game with giant maps built around looting and resource mining. In practice, it reportedly felt empty.

Staying in the Shadows

Despite these concerns, leadership committed to a shadow-drop strategy. The thinking was simple: it worked with Apex Legends in 2019, so why not again? Wildlight stayed silent, rejecting calls from within to run an open beta and gather broader player feedback before launch.

When Geoff Keighley played a demo and offered Wildlight a slot at The Game Awards 2025, they took it. The game was revealed as the event's final world premiere in December and launched on January 26 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. The reveal did not land well with audiences already exhausted by live-service shooters.

A Warning Nobody Acted On

Here's the part that stings a bit. Testing had reportedly been positive, but there was a clear caveat. Players found the game noticeably more fun when they were on microphone and communicating with teammates. Without voice chat, the experience was harder to get into and considerably less enjoyable. External testers flagged it. Nobody changed course.

Highguard launched to a peak of around 100,000 concurrent players on Steam. Promising enough on paper. But the game shed roughly 90% of its player base within a week, and reviews settled at a "Mixed" rating after an initial wave of negativity. Wildlight added a 5v5 mode within days of launch to address complaints about the 3v3 format, but the bleeding continued.

Tencent Pulls Out

Two weeks after launch, Wildlight called an all-hands meeting. Staff believed, right up until that moment, that there was enough runway to ship content, respond to feedback, and give the game a chance to grow. Instead, leadership told the team they were "out of money."

Tencent, which had been secretly funding the studio, withdrew that funding after Highguard failed to meet its launch metrics, with retention rate cited as the key issue. Most of the 100-person team was laid off on the spot.

Level designer Alex Graner was among the first to speak publicly, posting on LinkedIn: "Unfortunately, along with most of the team at Wildlight, I was laid off today. This one really stings as there was a lot of unreleased content I was really looking forward to that I and others designed for Highguard."

Wildlight confirmed the layoffs in an official statement, saying a "core group" of developers would remain to support the game, without specifying how many people that included. Bloomberg now puts that number at fewer than 20.

A Cautionary Tale

The live-service market in 2026 is brutal. Even with a team full of people who built one of the most successful shooters ever made, there are no guarantees. Several developers who spoke to Bloomberg used the same word to describe what went wrong: hubris. The belief that past success would carry the day, that an open beta wasn't needed, that a stealth drop would work twice.

It didn't. And now a studio that launched with over 100 people is trying to keep a game alive with a skeleton crew.

Whether Highguard pulls through is genuinely hard to say. The content roadmap is still being followed and updates continue to ship, which is more than some games in this position manage. But the Steam player counts make for grim reading, and fewer than 20 developers is a very small number for a live-service title with ambitions of long-term growth.