Highguard - Concord 2.0?

[moocow]

Pretty sure you mean 2026, and Concord failed in 2024. 2025 had Mindseye, Avowed, AC Shadows, Bloodlines 2, Firebreak, the Black Ops 7 "campaign" mess, and probably a couple more I'm forgetting. Even Concord wasn't alone in 2024 with SW Outlaws, Suicide Squad, Skull and Bones, Veilguard...

hey when I fuck up a punchline I do it right, god dammit!

 

[Disc]

I had a bit of a random thought: the developers said that they intended to shadow drop Highguard and didn't want the attention of being the final trailer of The Game Award. So, I have to ask... why the fuck were you even bumping elbows at The Game Awards if you didn't want any attention on your game before 'shadow dropping' it?!

Considering the layoffs two weeks after release, I’m guessing the money was running dry. It’d explain both why they jumped on the chance for the game awards spot (because they weren’t gonna survive a shadow drop) and why they didn’t pivot their other marketing resources to match it.

*semi-coherent squawking*

You’re missing the point. We know that game journos have no taste so there’s no strict relationship between the final announcement slot and quality; but this slot still generally has a theme of going to established franchises and studios. The attention wasn’t “how dare this random upstart get the spot reserved for truly wonderful games” it was “what fuckery went down behind the scenes to allow this generic slop from a no-name studio to grab top billing? Don’t you need to grease like a hundred palms for that? Why even bother for a MOBA’s inbred cousin?”

This is leaving off how many of your takes about these are just dog shit. Like arguing that they were announcing breath of the wild for the Wii U… before the switch was even announced. Or completely ignoring the “series AND STUDIOS” part of the counter argument to claim intergalactic didn’t count as being from something established,

Or just saying that it’s “smash ultimate DLC”, completely ignoring the context that:

• Smash ultimate was lirlterally releasing the day after the game awards, and this was the first significant character dlc announcement
• The crossover element means smash characters are highly anticipated for that element alone
• The character being announced was Persona’s Joker, one of the most anticipated characters from a critically and commercially beloved game.

And then there’s the “it was a flop” arguments. Putting aside that arguing “monster Hunter wilds is a flop” is obviously insane (though I wish it wasn’t, because it’s gonna negatively affect the franchise going forward) because you already had to move the goal posts from that… you do realise that you can’t use Actual Sales which occur AFTER a trailer to act as a counter to the argument that the franchises-slash-studios generally had established prestige BEFORE a trailer, yes? Do you not understand how time works, or are you just completely incapable of putting yourself in the shoes of anyone other than a retard in early 2026?

Did you have breakfast this morning? How would you feel if you hadn’t?

Fuck man, I fundamentally agree with your underlying point, but your shit’s all ridiculous to the point I’d look dumber for trying to act as tard translator if I didn’t double-shift as wrangler. I don’t even watch the game awards, I look at the trailers that sound interesting the next day at most, and IMO Jelq Keegley’s thoughts aren’t even worth being printed on used toilet paper. But a new, supposedly indie studio getting the last spot is still a noteworthy outlier that was worth looking into and clowning on.

 

[p1138]

This is leaving off how many of your takes about these are just dog shit. Like arguing that they were announcing breath of the wild for the Wii U… before the switch was even announced

did I say anything negative about breath of the wild? No. In fact I very specifically said

No, isn't some reveal from a renowned series half the time. Intergalactic? No.<snip> Breath of the Wild sure.

with the exceptions being Arc Raiders and Breath of the Wild

I wasn't arguing anything about breath of the wild, it just sucked dick that it was on the WiiU. No shit it was before the switch being announced? You focused on one perceived slight(which you got fucking wrong) and then went on fanboy trip angry that I didn't claim Breath of the Wild was a good game, when I never said it was shit and in fact lumped it in as being one of the 2-3 announcements that weren't for games that were shit or just fucking DLC.

Or just saying that it’s “smash ultimate DLC”, completely ignoring the context that:

• Smash ultimate was lirlterally releasing the day after the game awards, and this was the first significant character dlc announcement

So you're happy with games announcing paid DLC before they're even out? Holy shit have gamers gotten too used to taking it up the ass. Nevermind that a fucking paid DLC was the damned prestigious last trailer? Just think about this for a moment, you're upset that I criticized a shitty practice by game studios and publishers? Hooray, micro-transactions, bonzai!

And then there’s the “it was a flop” arguments. Putting aside that arguing “monster Hunter wilds is a flop” is obviously insane (though I wish it wasn’t, because it’s gonna negatively affect the franchise going forward) because you already had to move the goal posts from that… you do realise that you can’t use Actual Sales which occur AFTER a trailer to act as a counter to the argument that the franchises-slash-studios generally had established prestige BEFORE a trailer, yes? Do you not understand how time works, or are you just completely incapable of putting yourself in the shoes of anyone other than a retard in early 2026?

A live service game that relies on its players to buy microtransactions losing 95% of its players that fast is still fucking pathetic whether you like it or not. I already knew the damned game started with a million players on Steam. That doesn't change the fact that the game was such a fucking shit show(and apparently still is) that it'll negatively impact the... oh wait you agreed with me. I didn't make any mention of sales figures outside of MHW because some autist ree'd that I didn't like his favorite game.

Highguard looked like shit and got judged for it before the game was out.
Intergalactic? Same, it'll be a miracle if the game isn't shit. Not holding my breath.
MHW, yes it got a bunch of sales... and as even you agreed suffered for it
FF16 looked like shit, and was more of Square's flailing trying to re-invent the wheel with FF continuing to push it as an action game genre when it wasn't never that at it's peak popularity between 7 and 10. The Enix side of the company is at least smart enough to avoid this same repeated mistake with the DQ franchise.
Arc Raiders. I said people liked it. Clearly this is the case as it's doing well ans the trailer actually got enough interest to get people to play it.
ESO expansion, more fucking paid DLC, hooray
PUBG mobile, again I acknowledged this game does well.. in China, and why that was the case. And then the fucking smash bros DLC I criticized that you got upset over... just like I complained about the other DLC in these shows.
Metro Exodus, I didn't say a damned thing negative about it. The warframe expansion, at least it was free?
MEA, come on, really?
Walking dead telltale game. Yup this really deserved that "prestigious" spot didn't it? Oh wait, it fucking didn't.
Breath of the Wild, which I didn't criticize except for being on a shit system.

So once again, most of those were mediocre, or just looked like shit from the get-go unless you want to clap like a seal for fucking paid DLC.

 

[Counterfeit Obol]

Metro Exodus, I didn't say a damned thing negative about it. The warframe expansion, at least it was free?

If this is about Warframe's railjack update, that was a fucking mess. Warframe suffers a fair bit from content islands, but at launch the railjacks were pretty much their own country when it came to modding and damage types. Coupled with DE taking a break for the holidays (and the shitshow that was the Scarlet Spear event), and railjacks are still looked down on even after the devs made railjack modding identical to the rest of the game.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

It looks like Highguard's reddit has gone the way of the asylum and completely imploded. Something that curiously never happened with concord.

Here's some archives. Archive.today is down at the moment:

https://megalodon.jp/2026-0226-1458-35/https://www.reddit.com:443/r/HighGuardgame/

https://megalodon.jp/2026-0226-1500-24/https://old.reddit.com:443/r/HighGuardgame/

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/teYkm

 

[Oliver Onions]

That's obviously a fucking lie, moreso now that we know they were not in fact poor starving artists working by candlelight and were swimming in ching chong da ding dong money.

I still believe Wildlight wanted the stealth launch, it was probably their Chinese overlords (one of whom apparently has a seat at the TGA table) who said 'ho ho ho, I think the fuck not' and gave Geoff his marching orders.

It's a shame we'll never know now if it would have made the numbers better or even worse on launch day, but my guess would have been much worse.

 

[Bobbobson]

It's a shame we'll never know now if it would have made the numbers better or even worse on launch day, but my guess would have been much worse.

It wouldn't pass 10k players. The only reason it was even talked about in the first place was because Geoff decided to make it the last trailer of game awards. If it was shadow dropped it would be just trailer #46 for generic shooter, posted on IGN channel between 20 trailers for cozy farming slop.
It has no brand recognition to signal boost it and the phrase "from people who worked on x, y, z" has stopped working years ago.

 

[LopsidedLegend]

That's obviously a fucking lie, moreso now that we know they were not in fact poor starving artists working by candlelight and were swimming in ching chong da ding dong money.

If only they had less ching chong and more ding dong they might've made a profit from the gay porn lovers crowd.

 

[Lucas Silva #4903141]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-02-26/the-story-behind-the-failure-of-highguard

https://archive.ph/ySbTK

The Story Behind the Failure of ‘Highguard’​

By Jason Schreier

Hi everyone. Today we’ve got a bonus column unpacking one of 2026’s first gaming disasters — the sudden collapse of Wildlight Entertainment and its first game, Highguard.

Wildlight’s Demise​

On a warm evening this past December in Los Angeles, employees from the video-game studio Wildlight Entertainment gathered in the lobby bar of the JW Marriott. They’d just announced their new game, Highguard, at the Game Awards, hosted inside a theater next door. Now it was time to drink and celebrate.
At the same time, a less upbeat story was unfolding on the internet, where the reveal of Highguard was met with a flood of negative comments. Viewers questioned why the Game Awards’ final announcement was yet another multiplayer shooter. Some even drew comparisons to Concord, the infamous PlayStation game that flopped so badly it was removed from stores less than two weeks after its debut.
Shortly thereafter, in late January, Highguard launched. Initially, the game attracted a large audience. But the interest dwindled quickly, and less than three weeks later, Wildlight laid off most of its employees — a distressing turn of events for the studio’s small, close-knit team of veteran developers, many of whom loved working together and had shipped big hits in the past.

What happened? Over the last two weeks, I talked to 10 former Wildlight employees about the game’s development, its promising beginnings and how things went awry.
The story begins in 2021, when a small group of people who worked for the game developer Respawn, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts Inc., decided to quit and start an independent company. They missed the freedom of their pre-EA days, Dusty Welch, co-founder and chief executive officer, told me in an interview last month.
Welch didn’t mention another key reason for the exodus. In 2019, they had released Apex Legends, a battle-royale shooter in which dozens of players fight across a giant map. The game proved to be a massive success, generating more than $3 billion in revenue. Yet as sales piled up, some of the creatives who’d worked on it felt unhappy that they weren’t benefiting enough from the resulting windfall, according to people familiar with what happened, who asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic information.
The Wildlight founders decided to do things differently. One of their plans was to set up a profit-sharing program so that if the studio did deliver another big success, everyone would benefit — an enticing set-up that ultimately helped Welch and his co-founders attract many of their former Respawn colleagues to the new company.
Armed with a significant amount of funding from Tencent Holdings Ltd, Wildlight began hiring employees and making plans for its first game. The founders knew they wanted to make another multiplayer shooter, but they hoped to avoid the crowded battle-royale market. So instead, they looked to Rust, a survival game in which players can raid enemy bases and build their own. They began constructing levels and designing mechanics for what was envisioned as a survival-focused shooter.
Two years into development, the team realized that the design wasn’t working, in part because of the amount of freedom conflicted with their goals for highly competitive play, according to people familiar with the events. Also, the scope was too big. Still, some parts were salvageable. The base-raiding aspect of the survival game, in particular, seemed worth keeping. In January 2024, the team pivoted to what would become Highguard — a “raid shooter” that streamlined many of the survival aspects into a faster, more competitive game.

Over the next two years, the Wildlight crew played around with various ideas and player compositions — such as four teams of three players each — before landing on 3v3 matches as the foundation of the game. They aimed to release Highguard in early 2026 and expand it over time as a “live-service” game, addressing feedback along the way.
Many of Wildlight’s developers were itching to subsequently develop a single-player story set in the world they’d created. Such a move would follow in the footsteps of their former company, which had released the multiplayer-only Titanfall before eventually graduating to Titanfall 2, which included both multiplayer and a highly regarded single-player campaign. They hoped Highguard would be a foundation for grander ambitions to come.
In the year leading up to launch, Wildlight tested out Highguard extensively both among their own staff and with external players. They worked closely with members of Tencent’s TiMi Studio Group, although they tried to keep that secret. When I asked last month, Welch would not say who funded the game, and Tencent employees who worked on it are not mentioned in the game’s credits. (Journalist Stephen Totilo then broke the news last week that Tencent had funded the studio.)
Both Tencent and Welch declined to comment for this story.
Reactions from testers were mostly positive, but there may have been blind spots in the process, according to people familiar with the testing. Highguard was a complicated game to learn and was more fun when using voice chat to communicate with other players. When they tested it with the microphones off, it made for a much worse experience, former Wildlight employees said. Having developers on hand to answer questions and explain mechanics also led to different conditions than players would ultimately face when the game was released into the wild.
One solution may have been to open the game up to the outside world to start building a community and garnering feedback from a wider audience — a process that had helped other multiplayer games, such as Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6, find success. But whenever that notion came up at Wildlight, leadership nixed it. They wanted to recreate what had worked with Apex Legends, which had been kept secret until it was announced and launched at the same time.

As a result, Highguard built the wrong kind of buzz. Last year, when Game Awards orchestrator Geoff Keighley visited the studio to check out the game, he liked it enough to feature at his show. But in the seven weeks between the December announcement and the Jan. 26 launch, Wildlight stayed quiet, even as gamers online speculated about whether the game might be delayed or canceled. Employees at Wildlight were encouraged to stay off social media, where the negativity was amassing. The Wildlight leaders hoped that the game would speak for itself.
People who worked at Wildlight described the studio as a healthy, collaborative, transparent environment that made many of them love working there — at least until the final two months. At that point, they said, morale began to tank, and there were no straight answers about what success would look like, leading staff to grumble that they might be approaching things the wrong way.
When Highguard came out on Jan. 26, the player count was impressive, peaking at nearly 100,000 concurrents on the PC platform Steam (with similar numbers across PlayStation and Xbox). But early impressions proved negative, and because the game was free-to-play, it only generated revenue from in-game payments that would require players to stick around.
Reviewers criticized a number of elements, including the large map sizes and tedious mechanics such as mining, many of which were vestiges of earlier versions of Highguard. Critics also pointed out the game was so complicated that it was much less fun if you were playing with strangers and the mics weren’t on — a problem that Wildlight might have identified earlier by letting the public try out the game before release.
In the days that followed, Highguard’s biggest problem became player retention — a challenge that Wildlight’s management emphasized to the staff multiple times. A week after the game’s launch, they’d lost roughly 90% of their players, which was a scary number. A hastily released 5v5 mode was praised but didn’t bring people back.

Still, Wildlight staff were under the impression that they had enough financial runway to keep working on the game and addressing issues for at least the next few months. But at an all-hands meeting on Feb. 11, just two weeks after the game’s release, the company told its employees that the studio was out of money and most of their 100-person team would be laid off. They would stay employees for another week and then receive a small severance.

During the meeting, management said that Tencent had pulled the studio’s funding, according to people familiar with the events. Although the company didn’t spell it out, staff were left with the impression that their financing was contingent upon hitting certain metrics, such as retention rate, which they’d failed to even come close to achieving.
When asked what they thought went wrong, several former Wildlight developers used the word “hubris” — a belief by the company’s leadership that they could emulate what had worked in the past with Apex Legends, no matter how much the gaming landscape had changed since then. After all, they’d made one of last decade’s biggest hits.
Today, less than 20 people remain at Wildlight. They are continuing to update Highguard with the hope of salvaging the game and bringing players back — although it may be an uphill battle. On Thursday, the game’s Steam concurrents had fallen to below 600.

 

[Jace on ice]

Tl'dr "It's not our fault it's the gamer's fault, also reeeeeeeee."

 

[Toxic BRAAAAP Mask]

Big bad Tencent scapegoat, which yeah, but clearly thy had no idea how to reboot their crappy Rust-like. And Geoff escapes unscathed again.

 

[Snekposter]

And Geoff escapes unscathed again.

You can't rope the Pope.

 

[BoomerSperg1922]

edit: Back to the topic at hand now that we've passed the daily peak again
View attachment 8618986
Sub 700, with a dip to 254. Any day now they'll get the player population "distilled" to just the right number and it'll be a hit! If we assume an even split for 3v3 and 5v5(that really was terrible of them to do post launch) that's less than 58 instances of 3v3 games, and less than 35 5v5 games at its peak.

Highguarders, not like this...

 

[Disc]

And once again, Jason Schreier heroically delivers us exactly the information we need... like a whole month after the nick of time!

Welch didn’t mention another key reason for the exodus. In 2019, they had released Apex Legends, a battle-royale shooter in which dozens of players fight across a giant map. The game proved to be a massive success, generating more than $3 billion in revenue. Yet as sales piled up, some of the creatives who’d worked on it felt unhappy that they weren’t benefiting enough from the resulting windfall, according to people familiar with what happened, who asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic information.

In the year leading up to launch, Wildlight tested out Highguard extensively both among their own staff and with external players. They worked closely with members of Tencent’s TiMi Studio Group, although they tried to keep that secret. When I asked last month, Welch would not say who funded the game, and Tencent employees who worked on it are not mentioned in the game’s credits. (Journalist Stephen Totilo then broke the news last week that Tencent had funded the studio.)
Both Tencent and Welch declined to comment for this story.

Wanting to be free from EA only to wind up taking your funding from Tencent is a special brand of idiocy, but thanks for confirming that it's not just funding that went into this game and was hidden from the public.

Reactions from testers were mostly positive, but there may have been blind spots in the process, according to people familiar with the testing. Highguard was a complicated game to learn and was more fun when using voice chat to communicate with other players. When they tested it with the microphones off, it made for a much worse experience, former Wildlight employees said. Having developers on hand to answer questions and explain mechanics also led to different conditions than players would ultimately face when the game was released into the wild.

Lol, the devs didn't manage to account for the fact that games are easier to understand when the dev's literally over your shoulder?

One solution may have been to open the game up to the outside world to start building a community and garnering feedback from a wider audience — a process that had helped other multiplayer games, such as Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6, find success. But whenever that notion came up at Wildlight, leadership nixed it. They wanted to recreate what had worked with Apex Legends, which had been kept secret until it was announced and launched at the same time.

THEN WHY ANNOUNCE AT THE GAME AWARDS????
God dammit Schrier, this is like the most important question!

Reviewers criticized a number of elements, including the large map sizes and tedious mechanics such as mining, many of which were vestiges of earlier versions of Highguard. Critics also pointed out the game was so complicated that it was much less fun if you were playing with strangers and the mics weren’t on — a problem that Wildlight might have identified earlier by letting the public try out the game before release.

This whole game was one big sunk cost fallacy, wasn't it?

In the days that followed, Highguard’s biggest problem became player retention — a challenge that Wildlight’s management emphasized to the staff multiple times. A week after the game’s launch, they’d lost roughly 90% of their players, which was a scary number. A hastily released 5v5 mode was praised but didn’t bring people back.

Praised as an improvement over the base, but still barely adequate. Jason's definitely sugarcoating this a bit - he doesn't mention the missing stats screen, either.

Still, Wildlight staff were under the impression that they had enough financial runway to keep working on the game and addressing issues for at least the next few months. But at an all-hands meeting on Feb. 11, just two weeks after the game’s release, the company told its employees that the studio was out of money and most of their 100-person team would be laid off. They would stay employees for another week and then receive a small severance.
During the meeting, management said that Tencent had pulled the studio’s funding, according to people familiar with the events. Although the company didn’t spell it out, staff were left with the impression that their financing was contingent upon hitting certain metrics, such as retention rate, which they’d failed to even come close to achieving.

So much for all that independent studio crap. They weren't an independent anything, they were tencent's bastard child they wanted to keep any real connections to hidden.

When asked what they thought went wrong, several former Wildlight developers used the word “hubris” — a belief by the company’s leadership that they could emulate what had worked in the past with Apex Legends, no matter how much the gaming landscape had changed since then. After all, they’d made one of last decade’s biggest hits.
Today, less than 20 people remain at Wildlight. They are continuing to update Highguard with the hope of salvaging the game and bringing players back — although it may be an uphill battle. On Thursday, the game’s Steam concurrents had fallen to below 600.

Did any of them use the word 'toxic positivity'?

What about 'bioware magic' or any other euphemisms for 'everything I touch turns to pure gold'?

 

[HX-2]

Wanting to be free from EA only to wind up taking your funding from Tencent is a special brand of idiocy, but thanks for confirming that it's not just funding that went into this game and was hidden from the public.

Hey, at least Tencent pretends to not interfere in decision-making, it could have been Netease instead...

Lol, the devs didn't manage to account for the fact that games are easier to understand when the dev's literally over your shoulder?

This is not very surprising when you take a look at general (indian) office culture, which is to either pretend you are doing something, or do it to where it is "good enough." I for one am not surprised.

Did any of them use the word 'toxic positivity'?

What about 'bioware magic' or any other euphemisms for 'everything I touch turns to pure gold'?

That would require people to admit they fucked up and got high off huffing their own farts.

 

[NerdShamer]

The devs have doubled down with the ADHD simulator and released an "Base Rush" mode, an while ago

 

[moocow]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-02-26/the-story-behind-the-failure-of-highguard

And once again, Jason Schreier heroically delivers us exactly the information we need... like a whole month after the nick of time!

How did that faggot get hired at Bloomberg to churn out this garbage? He didn't ask any relevant parties any interesting questions whatsoever, ignored the obvious, added nothing to the conversation that people didn't already know, and turned it in a month too late to "matter."

Why does this faggot even still write about the gaming industry? He clearly hates it and everyone involved in it.

 

[Zenos Yae Viator]

How did that faggot get hired at Bloomberg to churn out this garbage? He didn't ask any relevant parties any interesting questions whatsoever, ignored the obvious, added nothing to the conversation that people didn't already know, and turned it in a month too late to "matter."

Why does this faggot even still write about the gaming industry? He clearly hates it and everyone involved in it.

He's of the Tribe.

He sticks to this because he likes fucking with things he hates, he hates gaming, and gamers, so he enjoys being a nusiance in that field, its a very Jewish way of commiting to a field, and its such a level if spite you have to commend it.

I bet you, hard money, Jason has less than 10 hours of gaming a month, if not absolutely zero.

 

[p1138]

The devs have doubled down with the ADHD simulator and released an "Base Rush" mode, an while ago

I know the player who recorded this is using a controller, but the rest of the fucking players look like bots.

00:50 there's at least 1 enemy just fucking standing still? And then another eats a grenade?

at around 1:00 you've got a teammate walking away to the left while being shot at from the right, but not bothering to just turn in the direction of the player recording to break LoS from the shooter? And then the teammate that's walking to the right at the same time isn't having to do anything to adjust their aim while just slowly walking forward and holding the fire button? No recoil management, not following a person trying to avoid getting shit at, etc?


1:40 once again it's just people slowly walking towards each other rather than trying to avoid getting hit

2:32 that aim... what the fuck.

2:55 "throwing grenade" for one, why the fuck does that need a voice line? second, why have the voice line that long after the grenade has already been thrown?

4:45 that aim again... dude is staring at the fucking floor for half those shots

5:56 damn near kills himself trying to blow up a wall with a rocket launch at point blank

6:20 This game had a fucking rhythm game mechanic to break walls with melee?

6:57 they had an AFK player? lol This wastes damn near a full minute of everyone's time after the last active player is killed off

 

[NerdShamer]

2:55 "throwing grenade" for one, why the fuck does that need a voice line?

I'd see if it was an generic warning for friendly fire, but...

why have the voice line that long after the grenade has already been thrown?

Devs are fucking retarded for not setting an audio trigger at the beginning of the animation

5:56 damn near kills himself trying to blow up a wall with a rocket launch at point blank

You can actually do the same with the breach charges and he consistently makes the same mistake with those

6:20 This game had a fucking rhythm game mechanic to break walls with melee?

This might have been in the tutorial, but the answer to everything is that only an retard would insist that this was an good idea.

4:45 that aim again... dude is staring at the fucking floor for half those shots

"Muh, recoil!"