It has been a tumultuous highway for Highguard and its developer Wildlight Leisure, and a few abnormalities on-line have observers imagine the net first-person shooter just isn’t lengthy for this world. Lower than every week after layoffs at Wildlight, the official Highguard web site went offline, eliciting hypothesis that it is the finish of the highway for the sport.
The Highguard website at the moment shows a “Website Unavailable” message and a assist e-mail handle to Code32, a internet hosting service particularly for online game web sites. The error web page additionally incorporates hyperlinks to the sport’s official X account and an invitation to the sport’s Discord server. As observed by Reddit users, the Discord button erroneously led to an unrelated server for a equally named “Excessive Guard Gaming Guild” earlier than it was fastened in some unspecified time in the future.
Whereas it is potential that the web site’s downtime is because of a internet hosting difficulty, the silence from Wildlight has gamers concluding that the studio has referred to as it quits on the sport after a combined reception and faltering participant numbers.
The official Highguard web site has been offline since Tuesday morning.
Highguard launched on January 26 after a high-profile trailer closing The Sport Awards 2025 garnered muted to unfavourable responses. The “raid shooter” reached a peak concurrent participant depend of over 97,000 gamers, with over 1.5 million folks making an attempt out the sport in January, however SteamDB charts present the numbers going downhill since.
Final Wednesday, Wildlight let go “plenty of [its] group members” whereas protecting a core group of builders to proceed work on the sport. The final patch for Highguard was launched on Thursday–the recreation’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 prolonged X submit, reflecting on the sport’s growth and the unfavourable consideration 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 within the head.”