Highguard Studio Hit With Layoffs Weeks After Launch

Wildlight Entertainment, the studio behind the new not-hero shooter Highguard, has reportedly laid off “most” of its team just weeks after the game launched on January 26.

Level designer Alex Graner posted about the news on his LinkedIn account, saying he’s looking for whatever’s next after he and an unknown number of employees have been let go. Kotaku has reached out to Wildlight for comment and will update the story if we hear back.

Unfortunately, along with most of the team at Wildlight, I was laid off today.

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.

However, I’m excited for my next adventure. If your team or anyone you know needs an experienced Level Designer, hit me up!

Highguard was announced in December during the 2025 Game Awards, and it didn’t go over very well with some sides of the internet. Then the team at Wildlight went radio silent for weeks until the game finally launched at the end of January and press and content creators got hands-on time with the game. The response to the final game was a bit lukewarm, albeit still hijacked by weird conspiracy theories that even Game Awards host Geoff Keighley acknowledged, though Wildlight was quick to respond to feedback about the game’s small 3v3 team compositions by adding a 5v5 mode within the first week.

Though the game seemed to struggle in terms of concurrent players, director and studio head Chad Grenier said in an interview with Polygon that the team was less concerned with player counts than it was making something its playerbase enjoyed. “Whether it gets a thousand people or a hundred million people, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “What matters most is that the game is loved by the people who played it.”

This is a developing story…