It’s never a good thing to hear about layoffs, especially as they’ve become rampant in the gaming industry. This one, though, will definitely be talked about for a while. The studio behind Highguard, Wildlight Entertainment, has laid off most of its staff following the game’s January 26 launch. The news broke when Alex Graner, a level designer, posted on LinkedIn: “Unfortunately, along with most of the team at Wildlight, I was laid off today,” he shared. “This one really stings as there was a lot of unreleased content I was really looking forward to that I and others designed for Highguard.” Another employee, Josh Sobel, shared a similar post on X, saying he was laid off from Wildlight, along with most of the staff.
It’s a bit wild when you think about it. Two months to the day, on December 11, the team was watching the game get introduced to the world as the final announcement at Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards 2025. The trailer wasn’t too well received online, but Keighley was adamant that the game played well and was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, Wildlight Entertainment chose to stay really quiet leading up to the game’s launch. Although it reached an all-time peak of 97,249 players, it’s currently sitting at 2,501 players at the time of writing. Highguard’s 24-hour concurrent peak is 3,822.
It goes to show just how difficult it is these days to capture players’ attention and how important playtesting is. As criticized as Marathon was, Bungie did the right thing by inviting players to test the game, getting feedback, and deciding it just wasn’t quite ready. Not every team can afford the luxury of time, but not doing any public playtests with your game prior to launch just isn’t a very good idea. It also doesn’t help that Overwatch just announced some major changes last week and has been recapturing players since then.
Similar to the NFL’s Coach of the Year Award, or even the famous Madden NFL cover curse, it’ll be interesting to see if being the final announcement at Keighley’s future shows is a kiss of death.
