Wildlight Entertainment’s free-to-play shooter Highguard is finally out on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S after weeks of silence, and already, the game has almost eclipsed 100,000 concurrents on Steam.
If you check out the Most Played chart on Steam, you’ll see that Highguard is clutching the number 10 spot (97,249 current), fending off the 2023 RPG Baldur’s Gate 3 (84,313 current) at the time of this writing. It’s nowhere to be found in the PC gaming distributor’s Top Sellers chart, but that’s probably because this list tracks the best-selling games by revenue, and while Highguard’s monetization strategy is pretty standard stuff for a free-to-play game, it doesn’t appear to have set the charts on fire. There is also a year-one roadmap with an update dropping every two months starting in February.
This is surprising for the sheer fact that, until this very moment, no one really knew anything about the game. Up until it launched on January 26 for consoles and PC, there had been no combat overviews, no hero showcases, no lore explanations–nothing. And yet, despite the very little marketing–aside from popping up in the closing slot at The Game Awards on December 11–Highguard is seemingly attracting an audience. Whether that’s mild curiosity or outright fascination remains to be seen, but over 300K people are watching the game being livestreamed on Twitch right now.
There are some caveats to the numbers, though. While impressive, Steam concurrents are just one piece of a game’s overall popularity. Player data on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S is not usually shared, so it could be far higher in the grand scheme of things, or it could be significantly worse on those particular platforms. Further, the way a game starts isn’t necessarily indicative of its long-term player retention. We can just look at EA’s Skate as a prime example of this; the free-to-play, live-service skateboarding sim had an all-time peak of 134,901 players at launch, and now, Skate typically hovers between 3,000 and 4,000 players at any given time.
Still, these numbers do look solid on paper, even if Wildlight Entertainment isn’t particularly concerned with huge player counts as evidence of its success. Only time will tell how long players remain interested in the game, as Highguard went from a “mostly negative” rating to an “overwhelmingly negative” rating on Steam.
