Wildlight Leisure, the studio behind “Excessive Guard,” has reportedly laid off most of its workers. This sadly means that Excessive Guard has already come to an finish, a storyline that many have predicted because the recreation’s launch.
As the ultimate announcement of The Sport Awards 2025, Highguard began out in a distinguished place. The preliminary buzz was adopted by a interval of silence, with some involved that the sport had been canned. And on January twenty sixth, Highguard was launched in a free-to-play mannequin on PC and consoles, making it out there to everybody.
Preliminary Excessive Guard previews have been sturdy, however did not translate into participant numbers. As reported by Shinobi602 on Twitter/X, a number of members of the Highguard workforce posted on LinkedIn that that they had been fired, suggesting that the remainder of the sport’s content material has been shelved.
What’s subsequent for Excessive Guard?
Shedding most of your workers is a reasonably dangerous signal for a dwell service recreation, particularly proper after launch. Infamously, Harmony lasted for nearly as lengthy earlier than being shelved, and the 2XKO workforce was not too long ago scaled again, suggesting the sport might quickly be on a cliff.
Highguard initially generated a variety of buzz at The Sport Awards, and has since change into a sizzling matter because of the quite a few controversies surrounding the sport, however that spotlight did not appear to translate into gamers really sticking with the sport and placing cash into it.
Shedding most of your workers is a reasonably dangerous signal for a dwell service recreation, particularly proper after launch.
In any case, a recreation lives or dies by its gameplay. Highguard had extra benefits than many titles that have been thrown onto Steam with little fanfare, however that alone wasn’t sufficient to promote it. If a recreation was enjoyable sufficient to maintain customers logging in day by day, like ARC Raiders, it might need been a candidate.
So what’s subsequent for Excessive Guard? Will there be a return of Ultimate Fantasy 14 type? This appears to be the tip of the excessive guard, and for higher or worse, there are limits to what might be executed to advertise dwell service video games.