Wildlight Leisure, the studio behind the not too long ago launched multiplayer shooter Highguard, has been hit by layoffs. This comes simply over two weeks after the free-to-play sport’s launch on January twenty sixth.
Former senior stage designer Alex Graner posted on LinkedIn, “Sadly, I used to be let go at the moment, together with a lot of the workforce at Wildlight.” The variety of individuals laid off just isn’t instantly confirmed, however the studio’s LinkedIn web page lists the corporate as having between 51 and 200 staff.
Wildlight’s official X/Twitter account confirmed the layoffs in a press release, saying, “Right this moment, we made the very tough determination to half methods with many workforce members whereas retaining a core group of builders who will proceed to innovate and help the sport.”
At BlueSky, Mat Piscatella of Circana (which tracks sport gross sales and engagement) highlighted that “Whereas Highguard was within the high 10 in weekly lively customers on US Steam and within the high 20 on each US PlayStation and Xbox (Circana Participant Engagement Tracker week ending 1/31/26),…” Based on SteamDB, Highguard reached a peak of 97,249 concurrent gamers on PC by way of Steam on its launch date and skilled a pointy decline. Two weeks after its launch, the variety of gamers was 4,524.
Graner additionally mentioned, “This actually hits residence as a result of there was numerous unreleased content material that I and others had designed for Excessive Guard that I used to be actually trying ahead to.” Initially, there was a 3v3 aggressive mode, however gamers accepted the smaller dimension of the unique mode, so a 5v5 mode was applied a number of days after launch. The workforce revealed the content material roadmap on launch day. It packs updates into seven separate episodes with new gadgets, modes, and characters each month all year long. It is unclear at this level how the layoffs will have an effect on the studio’s plans, however Widllight has mentioned it can proceed to help the sport.
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