Wildlight Entertainment Announces Shutdown Of Free-To-Play Hero Shooter Highguard

Today, Wildlight Entertainment announced that it would be shuttering Highguard, the free-to-play shooter that launched at the end of January. That’s probably not going to surprise those who have been paying attention to the game, considering the game’s general reception and the fact that they announced layoffs of all but a “core group of developers” about two weeks after launch. But it’s still sad, for the devs and for the players who were enjoying the game.

The closure was announced this afternoon via the game’s official Twitter account, where they gave a final operation date of March 12. The post goes on to explain that “despite the passion and hard work” of the team, they haven’t been able to maintain enough players to “support the game long term”.

While the post mentions 2M players having tried the game, that is over the course of the last month and a half. As for active players, Steam DB put the all-time peak at a little over 97K. Since then, the consecutive player mark has dwindled to under 500, and in some cases, less than 150. Even a free-to-play game needs players to spend money to survive, and the ones spending are going to be fewer than the overall player count. So you can see where the problem lies.

Before the game is shuttered, the dev team has decided to release a last batch of content for players to share what they’ve been working on. This will include a new Warden, a new weapon, skill trees, and more. Patch notes will be available at a later date.