Highguard, the MOBA-style FPS that garnered headlines as the final hype reveal of The Game Awards last December, is shutting down March 12.
Another live service game that bites the dust without even taking flight, Highguard is announcing that it is permanently shutting down on March 12. While the writing was on the wall, mainly because they fired most of the Wildlight dev team a couple of weeks ago, it still had a skeleton crew maintaining the game’s day-to-day operations. The official news, published on Twitter, goes on to mention how more than 2 million players tried the game. Considering Concord, a PlayStation commercial failure by all accounts, reached a meager 697 players at its peak, there was something else at play here.
Highguard was clearly a massive failure in the eyes of the executives that wanted a quick return on investment. A victim of schadenfreude on gamers’ part that wanted it to fail, they were discontent with the misguided live service trend chasing. Investors, on the other hand, wanted an overnight success the likes of Overwatch and Fortnite. If they only knew that those games were NOT miracles and had to pivot and evolve, I would be writing a different story. And then there’s Geoff.
Announced on December 11, 2025, at the Game Awards as the last reveal, Highguard’s spot is one that is usually saved for surefire successes. For instance, Geoff Keighley’s Summer Games Fest’s last debut was Resident Evil 9, which was highly anticipated and released to almost universal praise. As a brief analysis of what happened, it is likely Geoff’s backing made players have high expectations from the get-go. When the free-to-play shooter finally released, it peaked at 97 thousand players, only to freefall from there to 105 players yesterday, March 2nd.
There is much to say about the consistent failures from trying to hit an impossible jackpot. Ubisoft’s XDefiant, Warner Bros. Multiversus, and, of course, PlayStation’s Concord are among the games populating this graveyard. Competing against a consolidated market next to Call of Duty’s Warzone and the Galactus of pop culture, Fortnite, it is nigh impossible to make a dent without constant support to develop these always-online endeavors.
As a last hurrah, the Wildlight devs mentioned they will add a new Warden, weapon, and skill tree before it shuts down on March 12.
