Mere Weeks After Launch, Highguard Dev Team Lays Off Most Staff Members
In December last year, The Game Awards ended the show with the reveal of Highguard, a free-to-play shooter from Widlight Entertainment. Given the competitive landscape of F2P games, it’s hard to blame gamers who were less than enthused with the title’s end-of-show placement.
While the studio hasn’t mentioned how many players took up arms to play the game at launch, it seems it’s not doing that well, as Widlight has conducted layoffs recently, and they’re pretty significant if employee remarks are to be believed.
Highguard Developer Lays Off Most Staff Members
Multiple developers at the studio have confirmed the layoffs with Level Designer Alex Graner announcing it on LinkedIn, “Unfortunately, along with most of the team at Wildlight, I was laid off today.”
Graner added, “This one really stings as there was a lot of unreleased content I was really looking forward to that I and others designed for Highguard.”
It wasn’t just Graner that confirmed that “most” of the staff was laid off, as Tech Artist Josh Soble also confirmed it on X, stating, “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. I wouldn’t trade the past 2.5+ yrs for anything. I’m still spinning, and won’t be in a place to start thinking about the future for a while, but please keep me in mind if, in the near future, you’re looking for a senior or higher level rigger, CFX artist, or tech artist with experience writing Maya Python rigging pipelines, rigging assets, setting up game assets in Unreal Engine, leading a team through asset production with quick turnarounds, cloth and hair simulation, etc. I’m located in Los Angeles, and prefer remote work options. Thanks.”
Both developers, like countless others who got laid off, are looking for work. Let’s hope both land on their feet quickly.
While Highguard stormed out of the gate at launch, amassing close to 100K concurrent players on Steam alone (it’s also out on PS5, Xbox Series), that number quickly fell off. The game’s 24-hour peak is now at just 3,600 (per Steam Charts), though that’s not factoring the console numbers. Even if we did and assumed each console platform had the same number of players as on Steam, that would mean less than 12K players are online, which isn’t the worst, but not the best either — especially for a game that just came out and is relying on players to infuse money into it.
This huge player bleed migh tbe the reason that not even a month after launch, the dev team pushed out a new Warden already.
Will Highguard be able to bounce back or even survive this year? For the sake of the developers still at the stiudio, we sure hope so.
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With only 1500-3000 players on at a time, this is a sad end we all saw coming. I just wish devs didn’t gamble with their employees lives like this. It isn’t a Live Service game, its a Life Service. The moment it sees trouble, it ends the life of the people who worked on it.
If you are in the industry and are put on a team making a live service game, start looking for a new job because less than a month after it gets released you’re going to end up on the streets.