A Promising Launch Turns Sour
Wildlight Entertainment, the studio behind the recently released multiplayer shooter Highguard, has laid off what multiple former employees describe as "most" of the team -- a devastating blow that arrived just over two weeks after the game went live. The layoffs were confirmed through a wave of LinkedIn posts from affected staff members, including former level designer Alex Graner and former lead tech artist Josh Sobel, both of whom corroborated the scale of the cuts.
Highguard entered a fiercely competitive market populated by well-established free-to-play shooters. The game was built by a team with impressive pedigree, drawing talent from studios responsible for titles like Apex Legends and Call of Duty. Despite that experience, the studio appears to have been unable to generate the player engagement or revenue necessary to sustain its full workforce through the critical post-launch window.
The Studio's Response
In a statement posted to social media, Wildlight acknowledged the cuts while framing them as a painful but necessary restructuring. "Today we made an incredibly difficult decision to part ways with a number of our team members while keeping a core group of developers to continue innovating on and supporting the game," the company wrote. The statement suggests Highguard itself is not being abandoned -- at least not yet -- but that the studio is scaling down to a skeleton crew to maintain it.
The speed of the layoffs is remarkable even by the standards of an industry that has grown accustomed to mass job cuts. In many cases, studios receive at least a few months of runway after a launch to assess player reception and iterate on live-service content. The fact that Wildlight moved this quickly suggests the studio may have been operating with extremely tight financial margins, or that early performance metrics fell far short of investor expectations.
A Broader Industry Pattern
The Wildlight layoffs are the latest in a relentless pattern of job cuts that has swept across the gaming industry since 2023. Studios large and small have shed thousands of positions as publishers recalibrate expectations following the pandemic-era boom in game spending. Live-service titles have proven particularly volatile: while a successful one can generate billions in recurring revenue, the vast majority fail to find an audience large enough to sustain ongoing development costs.
For workers caught in these cycles, the human toll is significant. Many of the affected Wildlight employees had relocated or made career pivots specifically to join the studio. Several used their LinkedIn posts not just to announce their layoffs but to begin searching for new positions in what remains a deeply contracted job market.
Why It Matters
The Highguard situation illustrates a growing tension in the gaming industry between the ambition required to launch a competitive multiplayer title and the financial realities of a market that increasingly concentrates player attention around a handful of dominant games. When a title built by veterans of some of the most successful shooters ever made cannot sustain its team past the two-week mark, it raises difficult questions about whether the current live-service model is sustainable for any studio that is not already sitting atop an established franchise.
The economics are unforgiving. Building a modern multiplayer shooter requires tens of millions of dollars in development costs, and the post-launch content cadence expected by today's players demands sustained investment in new maps, modes, characters, and seasonal events. Studios that fail to hit critical mass in their opening weeks often find themselves in a death spiral: shrinking player counts lead to longer matchmaking times, which drives away more players, which further discourages spending on new content.
For the remaining members of the Wildlight team, the challenge ahead is daunting: keep the game alive and growing with a fraction of the resources they had just days ago. Whether Highguard can recover from this setback or joins the growing roster of live-service titles that never found their footing will depend largely on whether the core team can deliver enough compelling content to reverse the early trajectory -- a tall order with significantly fewer hands on deck.
