Highguard, the new free-to-play raid shooter from Wildlight Entertainment, launched in late January to high player counts that quickly dwindled after a lukewarm reception, despite bringing some unique concepts to the table. Since its launch, daily concurrent player counts have fallen from a peak of 97,249 players on Steam to around 2,000-3,000 concurrent players on a daily basis. According to an announcement from the official Wildlight account on X , the game studio has officially started laying off developers who were working to develop and support Highguard.

Another post on LinkedIn by Alex Graner, now-former level designer at Wildlight, confirmed that "most of the team" at Wildlight has been laid off, adding that there was a lot of unreleased content that the development team had been working on, which also makes it seem as though the layoffs were unexpected. Many attribute the game's surprise launch and lack of play testing and community feedback ahead of launch for the game's commercial failure. At launch, aside from performance problems, Highguard was widely criticized for poor pacing and a dearth of content in matches, largely owing to the oversized maps and small teams. Wildlight did attempt to address these complaints with a 5v5 game mode in a recent update , and, according to reviews, that helped make things feel more energetic, but it seems like it was too little too late. Wildlight will supposedly keep working on Highguard with "a core group of developers," although it's unclear what the studio's plans are for content in the long term.