There is a certain cruelty to the games industry's post-mortem cycle. A studio pours years of creative labour into a product, releases it to the world, watches it collapse in real time, and then — if the developers are willing to speak publicly — the inquest begins. This week, that inquest belongs to Highguard.
Alex Graner, a senior level designer laid off from Wildlight Entertainment last month, appeared on the Quad Damage podcast and offered a refreshingly direct account of where he believes the free-to-play shooter went wrong. His diagnosis is worth taking seriously, not least because it comes from someone who was in the room when the critical decisions were made.
The fundamental question is not simply why Highguard failed. Plenty of games fail. The more instructive question is how a studio assembled from veterans of Apex Legends, Titanfall, and Call of Duty could misread its own market so badly. Graner's answer points to a specific inflection point in development: the commitment to a 3v3 format that, in his words, represented his "biggest fear" as a player. As he put it on the podcast, "3v3 duos is always the sweatiest version of anything like battle royale, objective modes, wingman. It requires such a high intensity of communication with your team that it doesn't leave much room for casualness."
The numbers are hard to argue with. As reported by PCGamesN, Highguard launched on January 26 this year and drew close to 100,000 concurrent players on Steam within hours. Within 48 hours, that figure had collapsed by more than 90 per cent. By mid-February, the game was scraping together fewer than a couple of thousand simultaneous players on the platform. The studio then confirmed sweeping layoffs, with Graner himself disclosing on LinkedIn that "most of the team" had been let go, leaving what Wildlight described as a "core group" to carry on — reportedly fewer than 20 people.
Graner also pointed to the game's layered complexity as compounding the skill-barrier problem. Highguard demanded players absorb loot mechanics, objective stages, and overtime rules simultaneously. "When players are first coming in, it's a lot to grasp," he acknowledged. Combine that with a format where one disengaged teammate could make the entire match unwinnable, and you have a product that punishes the very players most free-to-play games depend on to sustain a population.
The counter-argument deserves serious consideration
It would be reductive to pin the whole collapse on a single design choice. Graner himself is careful about this; he speaks only from his vantage point as a level designer, not from the executive suite. And there are at least two other fault lines worth examining honestly.
The first is the reveal strategy. Highguard was unveiled as the closing "one more thing" of The Game Awards in December 2025, a slot traditionally reserved for franchise-defining announcements. The reception was lukewarm, with many viewers criticising the trailer for failing to explain what distinguished the game from the crowded shooter market. Wildlight CEO Dusty Welch later conceded, in comments to PC Gamer, that in hindsight they would have produced a trailer that better demonstrated the game's "unique loop." The precedent of Apex Legends, which launched without announcement and let players discover its appeal organically, was apparently not a template the studio chose to follow.
The second fault line is leadership. A report by multiple former staff members, cited across gaming press, attributed the failure at least partly to executive hubris: a belief that the pedigree of the founding team alone was sufficient to guarantee success in a market that had grown dramatically more crowded since Apex's 2019 launch. Strip away the talking points and what remains is a studio that arrived at a gunfight with Apex Legends and assumed reputation would substitute for the patient, iterative community-building that made battle royale a genre rather than a moment.
Then there is the funding question. Reports emerged, attributed to unnamed former staff by Game File and later noted by multiple outlets, alleging that TiMi Studio Group, a subsidiary of Chinese conglomerate Tencent, was the game's undisclosed primary financial backer. According to those reports, Tencent pulled funding at an all-hands meeting just two weeks after launch, triggering the layoffs. Neither Tencent nor Wildlight has publicly confirmed or denied the claim. The opacity around the arrangement raises its own questions about transparency to both players and developers.
A familiar story with a familiar lesson
The live-service shooter space has claimed impressive casualties before. Concord, Sony's reportedly $400 million investment, shut down within weeks of its 2024 launch. Spectre Divide, another tactical 3v3 shooter from Mountaintop Studios, peaked briefly and then descended into closure in early 2025. Each case involved talented developers, real investment, and a market that simply would not absorb another competitor without a compelling reason to switch allegiances.
The honest synthesis here is that Graner is probably correct, partially. A high skill floor, communicated poorly through a mismanaged reveal, in a saturated genre, backed by undisclosed funding with opaque performance targets: any one of those factors would be a serious problem. Together, they made recovery almost impossible once the initial player wave receded. Wildlight's subsequent move to a 5v5 format in response to player criticism showed responsiveness, but by then the momentum was gone.
Reasonable people will disagree about where the primary blame sits: with the designers who built a product for a competitive minority, with the leadership that apparently overestimated the studio's reputational pull, or with an industry that continues to greenlight live-service shooters into a market with very little room left. What is harder to argue against is that the players who gave Highguard a few sessions and found themselves "getting rolled" by coordinated teams were making a rational choice. In a world with no shortage of alternatives, a game that fails to make its first hour enjoyable for the average person has already lost.
History will judge this moment by whether the industry actually absorbs the lesson, or whether the next well-credentialed studio arrives with the same assumptions and expects a different result.