It’s never thing to listen to about layoffs, especially as they’ve develop into rampant within the gaming industry. This one, though, will certainly be talked about for some time. The studio behind Highguard, Wildlight Entertainment, has laid off most of its staff following the sport’s January 26 launch. The news broke when Alex Graner, a level designer, posted on LinkedIn: “Unfortunately, together with a lot of the team at Wildlight, I used to be laid off today,” he shared. “This one really stings as there was plenty of unreleased content I used to be really looking forward to that I and others designed for Highguard.” One other worker, Josh Sobel, shared the same post on X, saying he was laid off from Wildlight, together with a lot of the staff.
It’s a bit wild when you concentrate on it. Two months to the day, on December 11, the team was watching the sport get introduced to the world as the ultimate announcement at Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards 2025. The trailer wasn’t too well received online, but Keighley was adamant that the sport played well and was plenty of fun. Unfortunately, Wildlight Entertainment selected to remain really quiet leading as much as the sport’s launch. Even though it reached an all-time peak of 97,249 players, it’s currently sitting at 2,501 players on the time of writing. Highguard’s 24-hour concurrent peak is 3,822.
It goes to indicate just how difficult it’s lately to capture players’ attention and the way essential playtesting is. As criticized as Marathon was, Bungie did the correct thing by inviting players to check the sport, getting feedback, and deciding it just wasn’t quite ready. Not every team can afford the luxurious of time, but not doing any public playtests together with your game prior to launch just isn’t a excellent idea. It also doesn’t help that Overwatch just announced some major changes last week and has been recapturing players since then.
Much like the NFL’s Coach of the Yr Award, and even the famous Madden NFL cover curse, it’ll be interesting to see if being the ultimate announcement at Keighley’s future shows is a kiss of death.