It’s been a tumultuous road for Highguard and its developer Wildlight Entertainment, and a couple of abnormalities online have observers believe the online first-person shooter is not long for this world. Less than a week after layoffs at Wildlight, the official Highguard website went offline, eliciting speculation that it’s the end of the road for the game.
The Highguard website currently displays a “Site Unavailable” message and a support email address to Code32, a hosting service specifically for video game websites. The error page also contains links to the game’s official X account and an invite to the game’s Discord server. As observed by Reddit users, the Discord button erroneously led to an unrelated server for a similarly named “High Guard Gaming Guild” before it was fixed at some point.
While it’s possible that the website’s downtime is due to a hosting issue, the silence from Wildlight has players concluding that the studio has called it quits on the game after a mixed reception and faltering player numbers.
The official Highguard website has been offline since Tuesday morning.
Highguard launched on January 26 after a high-profile trailer closing The Game Awards 2025 garnered muted to negative responses. The “raid shooter” reached a peak concurrent player count of over 97,000 players, with over 1.5 million people trying out the game in January, but SteamDB charts show the numbers going downhill since.
Last Wednesday, Wildlight let go “a number of [its] team members” while keeping a core group of developers to continue work on the game. The last patch for Highguard was released on Thursday–the game’s official X account has been inactive since sharing notes for that patch.
Shortly after the layoffs, former Highguard lead tech artist Josh Sobel wrote a lengthy X post, reflecting on the game’s development and the negative attention surrounding the title after its reveal. Sobel has since deactivated his X account. One Highguard developer who remained with the studio described the layoffs as a “kick in the head.”