Highguard Confirms March 12 Shutdown After Tencent Funding Pulled and Player Numbers Collapse

Image via Wildlight

Highguard, the free-to-play hero shooter from Wildlight Entertainment, is shutting down permanently on March 12, 2026, just over a month after it launched.

Wildlight confirmed the news through an official statement shared on social media. The studio cited the inability to grow a stable enough player base as the core reason for the closure.

"Today we’re sharing difficult news. We have made the decision to permanently shut down Highguard on March 12.

Since launch, more than 2 million players stepped into Highguard’s world. 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. 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.

The team is excited to release one final game update to enjoy in the remaining life of the game. We'll be adding a new Warden, a new weapon, account level progression, and skill trees! Full patch notes are coming, and we're targeting tonight or tomorrow morning for patch release.

From all of us at Wildlight, thank you for playing, for supporting us, and for being part of Highguard’s story."

What Went Wrong for Wildlight's Debut Title

Highguard was revealed as the final announcement at The Game Awards 2025, arguably the most high-profile slot in the entire show. Host Geoff Keighley had personally played the game and decided to give Wildlight that coveted closing spot. But the studio was not ready for that level of attention. The original plan was reportedly a quiet shadow drop, with a slow and steady community build from there.

Instead, the internet had already made up its mind. The comparisons to Concord, the notoriously short-lived PlayStation shooter, started almost instantly.

Josh Sobel, a developer who worked on the game before being let go, spoke candidly about what followed. "Within minutes, it was decided: this game was dead on arrival, and creators now had free ragebait content for a month," he said. He also noted that the game "turned into a joke from minute one, largely due to false assumptions about a million-dollar ad placement," and that at launch, the team received over 14,000 review bombs from users with less than an hour of playtime, with many not even finishing the required tutorial.

Despite that rough start, the numbers were not entirely dead on arrival. Highguard peaked at close to 97,000 concurrent players on Steam, which is a respectable debut by any standard. However, that momentum collapsed fast. According to SteamDB data, concurrent players had dropped below 10,000 by early February, and recent figures have barely cleared the triple digits.

Image via SteamDB

The situation inside Wildlight was equally turbulent. According to Bloomberg, Tencent had been the financial backer behind the game. On February 11, roughly two weeks after launch, Tencent reportedly pulled its funding after the game failed to hit certain performance metrics. That triggered a wave of significant layoffs, leaving fewer than 20 people on the team to continue running the game.

To their credit, the remaining team kept trying. They pushed updates, added a 5v5 mode to address complaints about the original 3v3 format, and stayed communicative with the community.

The servers will remain online until March 12, giving players just a few more days to jump in. If you never tried it, there is still time to see what the fuss was about, for better or worse.