Highguard was originally announced at The Game Awards by Geoff Keighley, and while he may have thought the game would have a huge impact, many disagreed. The announcement received a lukewarm response, and most gamers thought the game would be dead on arrival. Nevertheless, Wildlight Entertainment pushed forward, with one developer saying the studio didn’t need a huge player count for the game to be successful. Unfortunately, it appears as though the opposite is true after the Highguard player count has dwindled and most of the developers have been laid off.
Wildlight Developers Laid After While Highguard Player Count Dwindles
On February 11, 2026, various developers from Wildlight Entertainment announced across social media sites like X and LinkedIn that they, and most of the staff, were laid off. One such post came from Josh Sobel on X, which read, “Today I was laid off from Wildlight along with most of the staff. It was the best team I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve never put so much of myself into a project before.”
Other posts share a similar message, with many others talking about how most of the team was laid off. Wildlight Entertainment confirmed the layoffs via a post on its X page saying, “Today we made an incredibly difficult decision to part ways with a number of our team members while keeping a core group of developers to continue innovating on and supporting the game.”
This comes after only 17 days of Highguard being active across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox. While we don’t know the official player counts on PlayStation and Xbox, the Steam player count hit a high of 97,249 at launch. As recently as today, the player count is seeing highs of 3,100 players. That is a staggering loss of around 97% of the player base from day one. It is hard to imagine that the team at Wildlight will continue to keep the game going at this rate, but we will see what the year has to offer for them.
