It sure sounded like nails being driven into a coffin when the Highguard website took a dive late last week. It’s still up, but rather than the flashy splash screen and exhortation to ‘play now!’ it simply says, “Site unavailable,” along with an email link—not to Highguard developer Wildlight, but to website builder and host Code32, which I thought was interesting, and yeah, maybe a little alarming.
Anyway, it was surely not a good sign for a struggling game, but it may not be the final horn, either. In a message posted on the Highguard Discord, a developer going by WL_Coronach said it’s not a big deal: The problem is mostly a paperwork-type of issue, and Wildlight isn’t rushing to do anything about it because it’s got bigger things to worry about.
They’re not wrong—to an extent, anyway. Highguard got off to a strong start with nearly 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, largely thanks to its surprise appearance in the closing minutes of The Game Awards, but the vast majority of that audience quickly faded away.
Worse, just 16 days after launch—and despite saying Highguard wouldn’t need “super huge” player counts to be successful—Wildlight laid off “most” of its staff. The studio said it was “keeping a core group of developers” to continue work on the game, and it has released updates since then, including a beefy content update that went live yesterday. Despite that (and particularly given that most of that content update would’ve been made prior to the layoffs), the writing sure seemed to be on the wall: Highguard is barely hanging on.
So with all that said, I really don’t think Wildlight’s comms strategy is doing it much good right now. The stubborn silence was arguably interesting in the lead-up to launch, when the whole thing was shrouded in mystery.
Now, though, the studio has shed a large portion of its workforce, Highguard’s website is trapped in an awkward, non-functional limbo, and the game’s concurrent player counts on Steam are regularly below 1,000—a massive, probably mortal drop-off over the course of less than a month.
Silence is golden but it also has a way of making people wonder if anyone’s actually home, and that’s not what you want if you’re serious about convincing people to give you another chance. If there is a plan for Highguard, I would say that now’s the time to start making noise about it.
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