Chad Grenier, the studio head at Wildlight Entertainment and director of the free-to-play raid shooter Highguard, has said it “doesn’t matter” how many people play the game.
Speaking to Polygon, Grenier said, “Whether it gets a thousand people or a hundred million people, it doesn’t matter. What matters most is that the game is loved by the people who played it.”
He added that his hope is that Highguard becomes a game that “people love and becomes part of them.”
Highguard launched in late January and reached nearly 100,000 peak concurrent players on Steam. However, the Steam numbers have dropped sharply since then. These numbers do not tell the whole story, though, as Highguard is also available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Before this, lead designer Mohammad Alavi said Wildlight was focused on finding a core, passionate community, and then trying to grow from there. Alavi said, “We don’t need [player counts] to be super huge in order to be successful.”
Also in the interview, Wildlight’s Dusty Welch said the team considered making Highguard a paid game as opposed to free. However, it “just didn’t fit in with where we wanted to go as a company,” he said.
Welch did not cite any examples, but one paid game that is enjoying significant success is the $40 game Arc Raiders, which just passed 11 weeks in a row as the No. 1 most-played game on Steam. It still has hundreds of thousands of daily players and has sold more than 12 million units.
Highguard was developed by people who previously worked on Call of Duty, Apex Legends, and Titanfall. However, the game’s Steam page scrubbed mention of Apex Legends and Titanfall after the game launched.
Not long after launch, Wildlight released a major update for Highguard that added the 5v5 mode that players had been asking for. Players can look forward to many more updates to come, as Wildlight has said the pace of updates for Highguard will be faster than Apex Legends. The studio has already published a 2026 DLC roadmap for Highguard that includes more maps, characters, and weapons.
