Highguard Studio Hit With Layoffs, Wildlight Confirms and Dev Says “Most of the Team” Is Gone

Layoffs have hit the development studio Wildlight Entertainment, makers of the recently released multiplayer shooter Highguard. This comes just over two weeks after the free-to-play game’s January 26 launch.

Former senior level designer Alex Graner posted on LinkedIn, “Unfortunately, along with most of the team at Wildlight, I was laid off today.” While the number of people who were laid off has not currently been confirmed, the studio’s LinkedIn page states that its size is/was 51-200 employees.

Wildlight’s official X/Twitter account confirmed the layoffs with a statement reading, “Today we made an incredibly difficult decision to part ways with a number of our team members while keeping a core group of developers to continue innovating on and supporting the game.”

On BlueSky, Mat Piscatella from Circana (which tracks game sales and engagement) highlighted, “Highguard debuted in the top 10 in weekly active users on US Steam, was top 20 on both US PlayStation and Xbox (Circana Player Engagement Tracker week ending 1/31/26) and yet…” According to SteamDB, Highguard reached a peak concurrent player count of 97,249 on PC via Steam on release day and experienced a sharp decline with only 4,524 players two weeks after launch.

Graner also said, “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.” While it initially had a 3v3 competitive mode, a 5v5 mode was implemented just days after release due to player reception to the small scale of the original mode. The team revealed a content roadmap on launch day that included updates with new items, modes, and characters each month throughout the year packed into seven separate episodes; it’s unclear how the layoffs will affect the studio’s plans as of now, but Widllight says it’ll continue to support the game.

This story is developing.