Just Two Weeks After Highguard’s Launch Wildlight Entertainment Announces Layoffs

It’s been right around two weeks since Highguard launched, to less-than-glowing reviews. As I pointed out in the article about the game’s reception, there were some positive reviews, but the vast majority of the negative ones I found had rather legitimate and reasonable complaints.

Of course, legitimate or not, the real test of a game is whether people keep playing it. Particularly when we’re talking about competitive shooters that need people in them for the game to be any fun.

Based on the latest news, Highguard hasn’t passed that test. As a result, the company has begun laying people off. News of the layoffs broke yesterday when Wario64 on Twitter shared a LinkedIn post from a now-former Wildlight employee, Alex Graner, stating they’d been laid off “along with most of the team”. The post also goes on to state that “there was a lot of unreleased content” that the team had designed for players that they were looking forward to everyone seeing.

The layoffs were confirmed by Wildlight about an hour later in a statement on Twitter saying:

”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 and supporting the game.

”We’re proud of the team, talent, and the product we’ve created together. We’re also grateful for players who gave the game a shot, and those who continue to be a part of our community.”

As is always the case in these situations, we hope that those laid off are picked up by other companies before too long – and that in the meantime, Wildlight is doing something to help with the transition.