Highguard, the star of The Game Awards 2025, shuts down on March 12
It’s over for Highguard after less than two months
👋 The multiplayer hero shooter Highguard is shutting down permanently on March 12, just over a month after its January 27 release
📉 Developer Wildlight stated the reason for the shutdown was an inability to build a sustainable player base, despite attracting over 2 million players
😬 The game, which closed out The Game Awards 2025, saw a dramatic drop in concurrent players shortly after launch
🥲 A final game update, including a new Warden, weapon, account level progression, and skill trees, will be released before the servers go offline
It’s official. Highguard, the multiplayer hero shooter that closed out The Game Awards 2025, is shutting down on March 12, despite only releasing on January 26.
In a statement, developer Wildlight Entertainment said: “Today we’re sharing difficult news. We have made the decision to permanently shut down Highguard on March 12.
“Since launch, more than 2 million players stepped into Highguard’s world. You shared feedback, created content, and many believed in what we were building. For that, we are deeply grateful.
“Despite the passion and hard work of our team, we have not been able to build a sustainable player base to support the game long term. Servers will remain online until March 12th. We hope you’ll jump in with us one more time to show your support and get those final great matches in while we still can.
“The team is excited to release one final game update to enjoy in the remaining life of the game. We’ll be adding a new Warden, a new weapon, account level progression, and skill trees! Full patch notes are coming, and we’re targeting tonight or tomorrow morning for patch release.
“From all of us at Wildlight, thank you for playing, for supporting us, and for being part of Highguard’s story.”
Despite the prestige of closing out The Game Awards 2025, and being suitably hyped by host Geoff Keighley, Highguard has suffered the same embarrassing fate as Concord, Sony’s now defunct hero shooter.
After reaching almost 100k concurrent players on Steam when it launched, player counts dropped off dramatically, leading to many concluding that the game was on borrowed time.
Clearly, that’s turned out to be the case, as despite sharing a year’s worth of content update in a road map, Highguard hasn’t even lasted two months.
The video game industry continues to be a cutthroat world, with success never a guarantee. Highguard’s failure isn’t too surprising, as the free-to-play multiplayer shooter genre is highly saturated, with players already invested in their favorite titles. It makes attracting and retaining new players extremely difficult, something that Bungie will be worrying about with the release of Marathon on the horizon.
Unfortunately, it looks like anyone who purchased cosmetics in Highguard won’t be receiving a refund, either, which is a bit of a slap in the face for those who actually backed the game.
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Adam Vjestica is The Shortcut’s Senior Editor. Formerly TechRadar’s Gaming Hardware Editor, Adam has also worked at Nintendo of Europe as a Content Marketing Editor, where he helped launch the Nintendo Switch. He also runs a retro gaming YouTube channel called Game on, boy! Follow him on X @ItsMrProducts.