Highguard is Shutting Down; Concord Resurrectionist Offers Help
- Highguard shuts down on March 12 after player numbers collapse, despite a final content patch.
- Steam player counts fell sharply, trailing rivals like Apex Legends and ARC Raiders; Tencent funding reports also spark backlash.
- A preservation team tied to LawBreakers and Concord offer to help save it, but anti-tamper tech may slow efforts.
Highguard, the live service PvP sci-fi/fantasy shooter released by Wildlight Entertainment on January 26, will be sunset on March 12. The developer has cited a lack of players as being the main reason for the shutdown, something that it initially claimed wasn’t a factor in building success. Meanwhile, a dev responsible for working on resurrecting Concord has offered help preserving Highguard.
Highguard is set to get one final patch, which should now be live and available for players across PS5, PC, and Xbox, that includes a new Warden (playable character), skill trees, account level progression, and weapons. Wildlight has been busy pushing out consistent updates since launch but it’s all too little, too late.
“Since launch, more than 2 million players stepped into Highguard’s world,” Wildlight posted on X on March 3. “You shared feedback, created content, and many believed in what we were building. For that, we are deeply grateful.”
“Despite the passion and hard work of our team, we have not been able to build a sustainable player base to support the game long term,” the company added. “Servers will remain online until March 12th. We hope you’ll jump in with us one more time to show your support and get those final great matches in while we still can.”
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Highguard Haemorrhages Players
Wildlight’s claim of 2 million players may be a little erroneous as public stats for PS5 and Xbox player numbers aren’t available. What is, though, is the player count for Steam – which is also the version of the game Wildlight is pushing on the official Highguard site. This peaked at 97,249 players at launch, but plummeted faster than a car driving off a cliff as it dipped to 11,517 just three days later on Jan. 30. It currently hovers around 460 players, although the number has been getting smaller and smaller literally every day since the start of February.
In a sea of free-to-play shooters, Highguard is drowning. ARC Raiders continues to pull in around 217,900 players at peak times on PC alone, with Apex Legends – the game some Wildlight devs worked on before Highguard – still getting over 192,600 concurrent players at peak times.
Wildlight Entertainment has gone on record stating that it hoped to copy Apex Legends’ success by dropping Highguard with minimal marketing. While this has now been shown to be hubris of the highest order, it’s not uncommon for newly-established game studios to bank on former success to transfer over to a brand new title; Yellow Brick Games, a Quebec-based studio featuring Dragon Age and Assassin’s Creed devs, has done well with its debut ARPG game Eternal Strands, for example. However, this company did normal marketing, rather than hope radio silence would somehow sell the game.
Secret Funding and Staff Layoffs
Wildlight attracted the wrong sort of attention after the Highguard reveal at the Game Awards, as many gamers questioned why an unknown studio got the final spotlight. Wildlight posted on socials, and staff mentioned in interviews, that it was an independent company featuring devs who worked on Apex Legends, Call of Duty, and other AAA titles.
However, this news did little to stop the flood of “Concord 2” jokes thrown at Highguard as many gamers noted how it looked like it had been designed by committee to try and compete with big-name live service games. This idea was compounded by reviews (from critics and players) that noted how it tries to do too much by cramming not just raid shooter mechanics, but crafting, base fortification, vendor trading, and a lot more, into its overall PvP framework.
Its continued fall from grace was also given an extra shove when Bloomberg recently reported that rumors of Tencent funding were actually true, putting paid to the lie that Wildlight is an indie studio, albeit one with AAA devs. A former Wildlight employee, Josh Sobel, stoked the flames of dissent with a lengthy article (now deleted, along with his account) on X blaming gamers for not understanding how great Highguard is, despite in-house playtesting being overwhelmingly positive.
Sobel joined around 100 other Wildlight Entertainment employees in a major purge of staff last month, leaving a skeleton crew to continue patching and updating Highguard.
High Hopes from Highguard Fans
Despite the bad news surrounding the game, Highguard does have loyal players who want to see it succeed. The game’s Discord channel is currently full of gamers lamenting its end but also holding out hope that it can survive in some way, shape or form.
Two ideas that have been floated include community servers and crowdfunding. One of the Discord mods, Coronach, who has an undisclosed role with Wildlight, answered these queries. “I don’t think there is time to develop that [community servers]. We’re getting this patch out then have to wind down.”
With reference to whether Highguard could continue with crowdfunding, they replied: “Honestly it’s difficult to say, I definitely think the game has unique fun and there are a lot of ways to make it better still but part of what made Wildlight great was the people working on this game. I don’t think we’d be able to put together the same group of people and I don’t think it would be the same without them.”
Perhaps most surprising of all is an offer of help from Red, the founding member of Ancify – this is a game preservation project/launcher that lets people play formerly dead games from one single app. “Hey, if you’d be willing I could totally help change some minor things on your side so the game would become tremendously easier to preserve, probably saving years of work while only taking a few minutes on your side,” they said in the same Discord chat about servers and crowdfunding.
“It’s really unfortunate I have to ask but I really hope there’s something to be done. It just really sucks seeing games like this die and I hope I can be of help in preserving it.”
At the moment, Ancify is home to LawBreakers and Radical Heights (both developed by Boss Key Productions), and Hyenas (Sega/Creative Assembly), although the level of functionality for each varies. Red and their team are also working on resurrecting the ill-fated Concord (as Concord Delta). However, the group has gone quiet, publicly, after Sony issued DMCAs against two Delta gameplay videos on YouTube in November last year.
While invites to a Concord Delta Discord channel are currently unavailable, Red has opened up a channel for Bluejay, the revival project for Highguard, and clarified the current state of things. “Highguard is a game that’s heavily protected by multiple protection systems (meant for protecting against cheaters but will very much hinder this project). Luckily we have an awesome reverse engineer here who’s known for being really cracked at… cracking.”
“But do expect this to take potentially a very long time if we can’t get a version released with the anti-tamper removed. We’re trying to reach out to Wildlight to see what we can do but we have low expectations for now.”
