Highguard Appears Ready To Say Bye-Guard, Players Believe
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It's been a tumultuous road for Highguard and its developer Wildlight Entertainment, and a couple of abnormalities online have observers believe the online first-person shooter is not long for this world. Less than a week after layoffs at Wildlight, the official Highguard website went offline, eliciting speculation that it's the end of the road for the game.
The Highguard website currently displays a "Site Unavailable" message and a support email address to Code32, a hosting service specifically for video game websites. The error page also contains links to the game's official X account and an invite to the game's Discord server. As observed by Reddit users , the Discord button erroneously led to an unrelated server for a similarly named "High Guard Gaming Guild" before it was fixed at some point.
While it's possible that the website's downtime is due to a hosting issue, the silence from Wildlight has players concluding that the studio has called it quits on the game after a mixed reception and faltering player numbers.
The official Highguard website has been offline since Tuesday morning.
Highguard launched on January 26 after a high-profile trailer closing The Game Awards 2025 garnered muted to negative responses. The "raid shooter" reached a peak concurrent player count of over 97,000 players , with over 1.5 million people trying out the game in January, but SteamDB charts show the numbers going downhill since.
Last Wednesday, Wildlight let go "a number of [its] team members" while keeping a core group of developers to continue work on the game. The last patch for Highguard was released on Thursday--the game's official X account has been inactive since sharing notes for that patch.
Shortly after the layoffs, former Highguard lead tech artist Josh Sobel wrote a lengthy X post , reflecting on the game's development and the negative attention surrounding the title after its reveal. Sobel has since deactivated his X account. One Highguard developer who remained with the studio described the layoffs as a "kick in the head."
