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Failed survival shooter and directors' arrogance — Jason Schreier's investigation into Highguard
The online action game Highguard failed with a resounding crash — the game's debut trailer was flooded with negative comments, and after launch, it lost about 90% of its player base within days. Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier revealed how the missteps of Wildlight Entertainment's management doomed the project.
In 2021, a small group of employees from Respawn Entertainment left to start their own company. In an interview with Schreier, Wildlight co-founder Dusty Welch explained that the developers missed the days when Respawn was an independent team rather than part of Electronic Arts. As the reporter notes, Welch did not mention another reason for leaving Respawn. In 2019, the team released the battle royale Apex Legends, which was extremely successful and brought "the electronics company" over $3 billion over the years. According to Schreier’s sources, many of the hit’s creators were dissatisfied that the financial rewards primarily went to EA executives.
For Wildlight, its leaders created a profit-sharing program for employees — this helped attract many former Respawn staff. Apex remains alive and continues to receive updates.
After securing funding from the Tencent holding, the team began recruiting specialists and brainstorming the concept for their game. The Wildlight leaders wanted to create an online action game but did not plan to enter the battle royale territory, which was already crowded with competitors. Eventually, the studio started working on a shooter with survival elements similar to Rust.
Two years later, production began to stall. The typical survival game freedom of action poorly matched the competitive action formula. Moreover, the game was becoming too large-scale. In January 2024, Wildlight removed many survival mechanics and shifted toward creating a more dynamic shooter — the future Highguard.
Over two years, the studio experimented with various ideas and match formats — for example, there was a version with four squads of three players each. Ultimately, the developers settled on three versus three battles. Wildlight intended to support the game with a service model and respond to community feedback after release. Many in the team hoped that Highguard would become a foundation for something more grand, including a campaign, similar to Titanfall 2.
Since Highguard had no public tests, it was only tested by Wildlight employees and invited players. Feedback on the gameplay was mostly positive, but, according to Schreier’s sources, the team overlooked some nuances. The shooter was tested in controlled conditions — Wildlight employees were in touch and gave advice to testers. After release, when ordinary gamers faced the game's not-so-easy-to-master mechanics alone, their impressions were completely different.
At the same time, Wildlight’s management refused to organize public tests — the directors wanted to replicate the success of Apex Legends, which was announced and released on the same day. They did not succeed — the Highguard reveal at The Game Awards 2025 turned into such a disaster that Wildlight staff were advised to stay away from social networks.
Interestingly, former employees describe the company as a healthy team where it was pleasant to work. At least, until the last two months, when morale began to drop amid anxious anticipation of the release.
Although the press and gamers received Highguard’s launch without enthusiasm, and its online population rapidly collapsed, Wildlight believed it could develop the project for at least a few more months. But already on February 11, the management announced that Tencent had stopped funding and most developers would be laid off. Those who were laid off received modest severance pay. Now, instead of a hundred employees, fewer than twenty remain on the staff.
When Schreier asked the reason for the fiasco, many former Wildlight employees answered with one word: "arrogance." The studio’s leadership stubbornly believed they would catch luck by the tail as in 2019, at the dawn of Apex Legends — can people responsible for one of the decade's biggest blockbusters be wrong?