The free-to-play shooter Highguard shut down on March 12, 2026. Sony is responding to the swift closure by automatically refunding microtransactions on the PlayStation 5. This could set a precedent for future releases.
After only approximately 45 days on the market Developer Wildlight and the platform operators have pulled the plug. The game, which was only released on January 26, 2026, for PC and PS5, failed to maintain the necessary player numbers. Within the community, the rapid demise is primarily attributed to technical mismanagement and an oversaturated genre. A final update in early March did add a new character ("Warden"), a weapon, and skill trees, but it couldn't reverse the downward trend.
Automatic refunds at Sony
While the situation on PC remains more complex due to individual policies regarding in-game currency consumption, Sony is taking decisive action on the PS5. (Reports) zufolg to Purchases of virtual currency and cosmetics will be automatically credited to the PSN balance of the affected users.
This particularly affects players who invested during the game's short live period. Since "Highguard" was a free-to-play title with no purchase price for the base game, refunds are limited solely to microtransactions.
Community root cause analysis
User analyses indicate that "Highguard" suffered from massive performance issues. Optimizations for GPUs and CPUs, as well as fixes for the level-of-detail (LOD) system, came too late for the vast majority of users.
Furthermore, it has been criticized that the game was released without public beta phases, which prevented the identification of fundamental design flaws in matchmaking and team sizes (originally 3v3). A 5v5 mode, added briefly, could not stop the exodus of the player base, although the developers responded quickly to feedback. However, the final blow was sealed by a lack of funding, as the investor withdrew immediately after the weak launch.
The failure of "Highguard" is no longer an isolated case, but rather joins a list of live service projects that didn't survive market entry. The frustration with the short lifespan of such projects is now leading to initial consequences in the industry: The first developers resigned has already publicly announced its intention to move away from this model in the future and never again work on such a live service concept.
The automatic refunds are at least one last victory for the players.
Nice of Sony.
Now to complete Marathon and Horizon Fortnite