Wildlight Entertainment is shutting down the servers of Highguard on March 12, 2026. This means the free-to-play project survived its Game Awards debut by only three months and joins the now long list of failed GaaS games. Only Concord was even faster back then.
The short path from hype to junkyard
Wildlight ends the experiment Highguard After barely six weeks of live operation, the shooter, which in December was still being touted as the grand finale act of the Game Awards and as a beacon of hope for the genre, failed spectacularly in the face of market reality.
The fact that two million curious people briefly checked it out at launch was pure marketing hype without any substance. Player numbers immediately plummeted afterwards, which had already led to problems in February. Mass layoffs It led to the final end. Now comes the final curtain. A last update this week brings a new character and talent trees before the lights go out forever in nine days.
When investors pull the emergency brake
Behind the swift demise lies the harsh logic of the investors. Tencent, the Chinese tech giant behind the studio, reportedly lost interest immediately after the weak launch and withdrew funding. While Wildlight attempted to save face with a skeleton crew, a live-service game is not viable without the necessary financial safety net. The lack of consistent revenue from microtransactions spells immediate doom, regardless of the announced roadmap for the entire year.
Highguard seamlessly joins the list of prominent corpses such as Sony's Concord One. The industry churns out titles on an assembly line, desperately trying to grab a piece of the "forever game" pie, while the audience has long been stuck with the established market leaders.
While it's commendable that Wildlight is now quickly releasing content that was already finished and waiting to be released, it feels like a final farewell from the grave. Those who invested time in the grind are now faced with a digital wasteland.
Another shooter nobody needed, financed by people who only wanted to see the numbers. I put the controller down and wait for the next press release that will tell us it's a failure as "valuable experience" sold.
Oops😂😂😂😂. Who didn't see that coming?😂😂
So, following the motto "Two is better than one," we will subsequently find that "All good things come in threes."
as soon as Horizon Hunter's Gathering inevitably crashed and burned.
There are some people who simply have to know everything exactly.
Well, that was obvious... garbage game
Longer than Concord
Gurilia Games could take a page out of their book and should start preparing a letter about the Fortnite Horizon flop.
And what was the previous writing about the evil gamers being to blame, sure?