Hi everyone. Today we’ve got a bonus column unpacking one of 2026’s first gaming disasters — the sudden collapse of Wildlight Entertainment and its first game, Highguard.

On a warm evening this past December in Los Angeles, employees from the video-game studio Wildlight Entertainment gathered in the lobby bar of the JW Marriott. They’d just announced their new game, Highguard, at the Game Awards, hosted inside a theater next door. Now it was time to drink and celebrate.
At the same time, a less upbeat story was unfolding on the internet, where the reveal of Highguard was met with a flood of negative comments. Viewers questioned why the Game Awards’ final announcement was yet another multiplayer shooter. Some even drew comparisons to Concord, the infamous PlayStation game that flopped so badly it was removed from stores less than two weeks after its debut.

Shortly thereafter, in late January, Highguardlaunched. Initially, the game attracted a large audience. But the interest dwindled quickly, and less than three weeks later, Wildlight laid off most of its employees — a distressing turn of events for the studio’s small, close-knit team of veteran developers, many of whom loved working together and had shipped big hits in the past.

What happened? Over the last two weeks, I talked to 10 former Wildlight employees about the game’s development, its promising beginnings and how things went awry.

The story begins in 2021, when a small group of people who worked for the game developer Respawn, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts Inc., decided to quit and start an independent company. They missed the freedom of their pre-EA days, Dusty Welch, co-founder and chief executive officer, told me in an interview last month.

Welch didn’t mention another key reason for the exodus. In 2019, they had released Apex Legends, a battle-royale shooter in which dozens of players fight across a giant map. The game proved to be a massive success, generating more than $3 billion in revenue. Yet as sales piled up, some of the creatives who’d worked on it felt unhappy that they weren’t benefiting enough from the resulting windfall, according to people familiar with what happened, who asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic information.

The Wildlight founders decided to do things differently. One of their plans was to set up a profit-sharing program so that if the studio did deliver another big success, everyone would benefit — an enticing set-up that ultimately helped Welch and his co-founders attract many of their former Respawn colleagues to the new company.

Armed with a significant amount of funding from Tencent Holdings Ltd, Wildlight began hiring employees and making plans for its first game. The founders knew they wanted to make another multiplayer shooter, but they hoped to avoid the crowded battle-royale market. So instead, they looked to Rust, a survival game in which players can raid enemy bases and build their own. They began constructing levels and designing mechanics for what was envisioned as a survival-focused shooter.
Two years into development, the team realized that the design wasn’t working, in part because of the amount of freedom conflicted with their goals for highly competitive play, according to people familiar with the events. Also, the scope was too big. Still, some parts were salvageable. The base-raiding aspect of the survival game, in particular, seemed worth keeping. In January 2024, the team pivoted to what would become Highguard — a “raid shooter” that streamlined many of the survival aspects into a faster, more competitive game.

Over the next two years, the Wildlight crew played around with various ideas and player compositions — such as four teams of three players each — before landing on 3v3 matches as the foundation of the game. They aimed to release Highguard in early 2026 and expand it over time as a “live-service” game, addressing feedback along the way.

Many of Wildlight’s developers were itching to subsequently develop a single-player story set in the world they’d created. Such a move would follow in the footsteps of their former company, which had released the multiplayer-only Titanfall before eventually graduating to Titanfall 2, which included both multiplayer and a highly regarded single-player campaign. They hoped Highguard would be a foundation for grander ambitions to come.

In the year leading up to launch, Wildlight tested out Highguard extensively both among their own staff and with external players. They worked closely with members of Tencent’s TiMi Studio Group, although they tried to keep that secret. When I asked last month, Welch would not say who funded the game, and Tencent employees who worked on it are not mentioned in the game’s credits. (Journalist Stephen Totilo then broke the news last week that Tencent had funded the studio.)
Both Tencent and Welch declined to comment for this story.

Reactions from testers were mostly positive, but there may have been blind spots in the process, according to people familiar with the testing. Highguard was a complicated game to learn and was more fun when using voice chat to communicate with other players. When they tested it with the microphones off, it made for a much worse experience, former Wildlight employees said. Having developers on hand to answer questions and explain mechanics also led to different conditions than players would ultimately face when the game was released into the wild.

One solution may have been to open the game up to the outside world to start building a community and garnering feedback from a wider audience — a process that had helped other multiplayer games, such as Arc Raidersand Battlefield 6, find success. But whenever that notion came up at Wildlight, leadership nixed it. They wanted to recreate what had worked with Apex Legends, which had been kept secret until it was announced and launched at the same time.

As a result, Highguard built the wrong kind of buzz. Last year, when Game Awards orchestrator Geoff Keighley visited the studio to check out the game, he liked it enough to feature at his show. But in the seven weeks between the December announcement and the Jan. 26 launch, Wildlight stayed quiet, even as gamers online speculated about whether the game might be delayed or canceled. Employees at Wildlight were encouraged to stay off social media, where the negativity was amassing. The Wildlight leaders hoped that the game would speak for itself.

People who worked at Wildlight described the studio as a healthy, collaborative, transparent environment that made many of them love working there — at least until the final two months. At that point, they said, morale began to tank, and there were no straight answers about what success would look like, leading staff to grumble that they might be approaching things the wrong way.
When Highguard came out on Jan. 26, the player count was impressive, peaking at nearly 100,000 concurrents on the PC platform Steam (with similar numbers across PlayStation and Xbox). But early impressions proved negative, and because the game was free-to-play, it only generated revenue from in-game payments that would require players to stick around.

Reviewers criticized a number of elements, including the large map sizes and tedious mechanics such as mining, many of which were vestiges of earlier versions of Highguard. Critics also pointed out the game was so complicated that it was much less fun if you were playing with strangers and the mics weren’t on — a problem that Wildlight might have identified earlier by letting the public try out the game before release.
In the days that followed, Highguard’s biggest problem became player retention — a challenge that Wildlight’s management emphasized to the staff multiple times. A week after the game’s launch, they’d lost roughly 90% of their players, which was a scary number. A hastily released 5v5 mode was praised but didn’t bring people back.

Still, Wildlight staff were under the impression that they had enough financial runway to keep working on the game and addressing issues for at least the next few months. But at an all-hands meeting on Feb. 11, just two weeks after the game’s release, the company told its employees that the studio was out of money and most of their 100-person team would be laid off. They would stay employees for another week and then receive a small severance.

During the meeting, management said that Tencent had pulled the studio’s funding, according to people familiar with the events. Although the company didn’t spell it out, staff were left with the impression that their financing was contingent upon hitting certain metrics, such as retention rate, which they’d failed to even come close to achieving.
When asked what they thought went wrong, several former Wildlight developers used the word “hubris” — a belief by the company’s leadership that they could emulate what had worked in the past with Apex Legends, no matter how much the gaming landscape had changed since then. After all, they’d made one of last decade’s biggest hits.

Today, less than 20 people remain at Wildlight. They are continuing to update Highguard with the hope of salvaging the game and bringing players back — although it may be an uphill battle. On Thursday, the game’s Steam concurrents had fallen to below 600