Highguard, the free-to-play PvP “raid shooter” introduced at The Recreation Awards final 12 months and launched to preemptive criticism and mockery just for most of its builders to be laid off simply weeks after launch, was apparently financially backed by Tencent, in accordance to a report.
This comes from Game File, which reports that the Chinese language gaming mogul was the first monetary backer behind developer Wildlight Leisure, an association that was not publicly shared by both firm.
Prior to this report, it was unclear who was funding Wildlight, regardless of Highguard seemingly being in growth for plenty of years prior to its announcement at The Recreation Awards in December. Its official LinkedIn page has lengthy included the road that Wildlight is “a brand new, fully-funded leisure studio.”
That grand announcement, its time and place instigated by The Game Awards host Geoff Keighley moderately than the studio, sparked weeks of mockery on-line, with plenty of content material creators declaring the sport useless earlier than it had even launched. Upon launch, Highguard netted practically 100k Steam concurrents, however critic opinions (together with ours) had been simply so-so and consumer scores had been low. Just some weeks later, builders from Wildlight revealed that almost all of them had been laid off. Since then, one developer who labored on the sport has mirrored that Highguard was “was a joke from minute one” due to false assumptions comprised of the TGA trailer, and plenty of different high-profile builders have come to its protection.
It stays unclear how closely reliant Wildlight was on Tencent, or whether or not a call to pull funding was made in some unspecified time in the future that led to the mass layoffs. Wildlight’s future as a studio additionally stays unclear, with a studio assertion saying that it will retain a “core group of builders” to maintain Highguard going. Nevertheless, the sport’s website went offline earlier at the moment and has but to be restored, main some to speculate that the sport and even the studio is about to absolutely shut down.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Bought a narrative tip? Ship it to rvalentine@ign.com.