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

Layoffs have hit the event studio Wildlight Leisure, makers of the not too long ago launched multiplayer shooter Highguard. This comes simply over two weeks after the free-to-play sport’s January 26 launch.

Former senior degree designer Alex Graner posted on LinkedIn, “Sadly, together with many of the workforce at Wildlight, I used to be laid off right this moment.” Whereas the quantity of people that had been laid off has not presently been confirmed, the studio’s LinkedIn web page states that its dimension is/was 51-200 workers.

Wildlight’s official X/Twitter account confirmed the layoffs with a press release studying, “In the present day we made an extremely troublesome choice to half methods with quite a few our workforce members whereas preserving a core group of builders to proceed innovating on and supporting the sport.”

On BlueSky, Mat Piscatella from Circana (which tracks sport gross sales and engagement) highlighted, “Highguard debuted within the prime 10 in weekly energetic customers on US Steam, was prime 20 on each US PlayStation and Xbox (Circana Participant Engagement Tracker week ending 1/31/26) and but…” In accordance with SteamDB, Highguard reached a peak concurrent participant depend of 97,249 on PC by way of Steam on launch day and skilled a pointy decline with solely 4,524 gamers two weeks after launch.

Graner additionally stated, “This one actually stings as there was a whole lot of unreleased content material I used to be actually trying ahead to that I and others designed for Highguard.” Whereas it initially had a 3v3 aggressive mode, a 5v5 mode was applied simply days after launch as a result of participant reception to the small scale of the unique mode. The workforce revealed a content material roadmap on launch day that included updates with new objects, modes, and characters every month all year long packed into seven separate episodes; it is unclear how the layoffs will have an effect on the studio’s plans as of now, however Widllight says it’s going to proceed to assist the sport.

This story is growing.