Inside the hubris, missteps, and rapid decline that doomed Wildlight’s live service gamble in Highguard.
You finally have a clear picture of what went wrong with Highguard, straight from a detailed report by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. The numbers alone tell you this story was never headed in a good direction. At its peak, Highguard pulled in nearly 100,000 concurrent players. That sounds promising. But once you look at where things stand now, the reality hits hard. The game’s 24-hour peak recently sat at just 551 players. For a free-to-play live service that depends on constant engagement and recurring monetization, those numbers are nowhere near sustainable.
The public reception has not helped either. On Steam, the user score sits at 46 percent, firmly in mixed territory. Critics have not been much kinder, with an average of around 63 percent. That tells you this is not simply the result of a hate campaign or internet exaggeration. The game is not a disaster, as some early reactions suggested, but it is also nowhere near the breakout success others hoped it would be.
Even the addition of a 5v5 mode failed to reverse the decline. When most of the studio’s staff were laid off less than two weeks after launch, it became clear you were not looking at a live service that had room to recover. You were looking at one that was already on life support.
Schreier’s report pulls from interviews with 10 former Wildlight employees, and what you get is a cautionary tale about ambition, confidence, and blind spots. The story begins in 2021, when several developers left Respawn. They wanted out of the traditional AAA publisher structure under EA and hoped to recapture a sense of independence.
There was also frustration tied to Apex Legends. Despite the massive revenue that game generated, some creatives felt they did not benefit enough from its success. So the idea behind Wildlight was simple: build something new, replicate that kind of success, and implement profit-sharing so that if lightning struck again, everyone would share in the reward.
That promise brought in more talented people from Respawn.
Then came the money, including an investment from Tencent. With the money in place, work began on a new project. The idea was heavily based on survival games at first. Think about how Rust works, where you take over enemy bases and manage your resources. The team’s goal was to create a shooter focused on survival. But the fact that survival games are like sandboxes didn’t work with the competitive structure they also wanted. After two years of working on it, they had to admit that the original idea wasn’t working.
They didn’t throw everything away; instead, they saved some things. The overhaul didn’t eliminate base raiding. The team fully switched to what would become Highguard in January 2024. The new direction was based on a raid shooter format that combined survival systems with faster, more competitive gameplay. They tried out different ways for teams to work together. They tried out four teams of three players at different times, as well as 5v5. They finally decided that 3v3 would be the main mode.
That decision would haunt the game.
3v3 felt tight and focused. But it didn’t work well on big maps. You could go a long time without seeing other players during matches, especially in the early looting phase before any base raids. You often felt bored instead of tense. The pacing just didn’t fit the scale of the map. After the game launched, much of the criticism focused on this issue, prompting the team to rush to release a 5v5 mode to keep players. At that point, a lot of the damage had already been done.
Internally, the team’s confidence was high. Playtests within the studio showed strong feedback. But those tests had blind spots. The game was complex and easier to grasp when developers were present to explain mechanics. Voice chat significantly improved the experience, which meant coordinated internal sessions did not reflect how the broader audience would engage with the game. Once players jumped in without constant guidance or active microphones, the friction became obvious.
Some developers suggested broader playtesting, including a beta, to gather real-world feedback before full release. Leadership reportedly turned those proposals down. That level of confidence only works if the final product meets expectations. When it does not, it starts to look like arrogance.
The leadership team believed their track record at Respawn gave them a formula to follow.
They had shipped Titanfall. They had shipped Apex Legends. The thinking was that they could replicate aspects of those successes. There were even discussions about eventually adding a single-player campaign to Highguard, mirroring Titanfall’s evolution. On the Apex side, the idea of a shadow drop was attractive. Apex Legends had launched without prior marketing and exploded in popularity.
But Highguard did not follow that path. It was prominently revealed at The Game Awards, eliminating any possibility of a true shadow drop. More importantly, Apex had the advantage of Respawn’s established brand and trust. Wildlight was a new studio with a new IP entering a market already saturated with live service games. Replicating Apex’s trajectory without the same foundation proved unrealistic.
Highguard attracted a large initial audience when it launched. On Steam alone, there were almost 100,000 concurrent players; comparable levels of engagement have been reported on PlayStation and Xbox as well. There was interest. Retention wasn’t. The game lost over 80 percent of its players in a single day. That decline increased to about 90 percent a week later. The number of active players is currently less than 1% of its peak.
On February 11, 2026, two weeks following launch, Wildlight convened an all-hands meeting.
Due to funding constraints, the majority of employees were let go. After the game’s metrics fell short of the predetermined goals, Tencent, which had supported the project, stopped funding it. The performance did not meet expectations. The studio could not support its employees without more funding.
Now fewer than 20 people remain at Wildlight. That is not enough manpower to maintain a live service at the scale required to bring players back. The remaining team members continue to push updates in hopes of turning things around. But the odds are not in their favor.
Former employees describe the work environment for much of the project as collaborative and transparent. Morale was strong until the final months, when uncertainty grew, and expectations became unclear. In hindsight, the warning signs were there. The belief that past success could guarantee future results in a dramatically different landscape ultimately proved costly.
You are left with a story that feels both ambitious and tragic.
The team set high goals and believed in their vision. But because of poor strategic decisions, excessive reliance on internal validation, and a refusal to test the waters in public, flaws were only fully revealed after launch. At that point, the market had already made up its mind about Highguard.
Highguard arrived with momentum. It exited almost as quickly. A comeback would require more than incremental updates. It would require a fundamental reversal of fortune. For now, it stands as a reminder that even experienced developers cannot rely solely on past victories to secure future ones.
