Studio Wildlight Entertainment, founded by people from Respawn Entertainment, found itself on the verge of closure just two weeks after the release of its debut project, the shareware raid shooter Highguard. Jason Schrayer in his investigation found out how the project went from “potential hit” to “complete failure.”
The story of the Wildlight studio began in 2021, when a group of Respawn employees decided to leave the company. According to Schrayer, some Apex Legends developers were extremely dissatisfied with the distribution of profits, which amount to more than $3 billion. Therefore, the new studio implemented a profit sharing system so that if successful, all employees would benefit financially. Thanks to this, we were able to attract several key developers.
Wildlight studio attracted significant investment from Tencent as seed capital and began creating its first project. However, they tried to keep silent about this, and the fact of financing and interaction with TiMi Studio Group, owned by Tencent, surfaced shortly after the release.
Initially, the team was working on a shooter with survival elements in the spirit of Rust. However, after two years, the developers realized that “the design wasn’t working”, partly due to too much freedom and too much scale, which did not fit well with the competitive format. In January 2024, the project was relaunched in the raid-shooter format, focusing on dynamics and PvP.
Over the next two years, the developers experimented with different ideas and player compositions, but eventually settled on 3v3 matches as the basis of the game. Further development and changes to the game were to be based on player feedback after the launch of Early Access. In addition, there were plans to create a single-player story game, as was done in the Titanfall franchise.
The last year before the release, active tests were carried out among employees of Wildlight, TiMi Studio Group and third-party players. Testers rated the game quite well, but reported some “blind spots”: the game was difficult to learn, there was no voice chat, and so on. These problems could be assessed during public tests and solutions could be prepared, but management rejected all such proposals.
Here it is worth noting one of the key problems, which has already been reported many times – Highguard planned to launch “quietly” without any advertising campaign, remaining silent until the servers opened. The management was confident that they could repeat the situation with Apex Legends, so they rejected all ideas with public tests and advertising of the game before the start of early access.
Following Geoff Killey’s decision to make Highguard the final announcement at The Game Awards 2025, the situation surrounding the game has taken a turn for the worse. Players reacted negatively to “another superhero shooter,” and management continued to insist on maintaining complete silence. Wildlight employees were even advised not to use social media to avoid facing negativity.
In the last two months before the start of early access, the team spirit in the development team began to decline, since there were no clear answers to all their questions and doubts arose about the correctness of the creation of the project. At the same time, former employees told Schraer that before that the atmosphere in the studio was “healthy,” “cooperative,” and people liked to work in it.
When Highguard released on January 26, 2026, the game nearly reached 100,000 concurrent users on Steam, with similar numbers on PlayStation and Xbox consoles. However, players drowned the game in negative reviews and were in no hurry to purchase paid goods, which is very important for a free game.
After a week, online games dropped by 90%, and it became clear that the developers had failed to achieve one of their main goals – to retain players. All subsequent changes and innovations, such as the 5v5 mode, were unable to bring back players or slow down the decline in online play.
As a result, on February 11, just two weeks after the launch of Early Access, management announced that the studio had run out of money because Tencent had withdrawn funding and most of the staff would be laid off. At the time, Wildlight employed about 100 people, but today there are less than 20 people working to save the game.
Former developers, when asked about the reasons for Highguard’s failure, used the word “arrogance” to describe the management, which was convinced of the guaranteed repetition of the success of Apex Legends, regardless of how the gaming industry and player demands had changed.
