RIP Highguard: In a better world, an FPS is allowed to be unpopular

Wildlight Entertainment announced today that Highguard is shutting down on March 12. Servers will go offline just 45 days after they went online, cementing the 3v3 "raid shooter" as another live service boondoggle.

I won't relitigate the noxious cloud of internet that surrounded Highguard, because ultimately, premature "hate playing" is not the reason it's going away. Highguard is shutting down because live service games are not allowed to be unpopular.

It's important to establish that Highguard had fans. Thousands of people were playing it—its regular concurrents hung around 400 on Steam and at least double that on PS5, according to game director Chad Grenier. Remember, peak concurrents are not a measure of how many total people played a game that day—that number is usually much higher but never public.

For a brand new studio making its first game, I'd say that's pretty good. Highguard wasn't popular, but neither are dozens of multiplayer shooters that've stuck around for years. This pattern of games shutting down just days, weeks, or months after they debut is still a very recent, ugly phenomenon. It's one thing to stop actively developing an FPS with a small audience and move on to greener pastures. It's another to throw it away like it was trash.

To treat this like it's normal is to let the morons who make these calls off the hook. In this case, Tencent was reportedly Wildlight's big backer that immediately cut off funding when it wasn't a hit. It should be galactically embarrassing for these suits to display such a dearth of belief or awareness in what they were helping create.

At what point did these moneymen really think they were funding the next Apex Legends? Did they not hear the same pitch I did from Wildlight in January? It's an FPS centered around Capture the Flag that morphs into Rainbow Six lite every five minutes. It has "cool, but obviously niche" written all over it.

It's on Wildlight, too. Not the frontline developers who made a well-constructed FPS that, despite its complexity, played great—but the leadership that built a 100+-person team on terms that had Highguard teetering over a cliff. You had your employees out there telling people like me that Highguard didn't need high player counts to be successful, that Wildlight had plenty of runway because they knew what they were making. I believe they believed that.

"Being the ire of the internet hate machine sucks, but at the same time, I try to just focus on making the best game I can and getting that game into people's hands. At the end of the day, that's all that really matters," lead designer Mohammad Alavi told me a few days before Highguard's launch.

"We're a small team. A six-player match is not hard to find. What we're really hoping for is a core group of fans that love us."

They did it. And it doesn't even matter.

Highguard was not a dead game, it's being murdered. Its only sin was not living up to expectations that only a dumb or spiritually bankrupt person would foist upon it. And when news of its execution came down the pipe, there was, of course, no mention of options to keep Highguard playable even if it'd no longer be worked on. No possibility of third-party servers, no offline mode.

That's because its financiers did not ever care about Highguard, the people who made it, or the fans who played it. Tencent did not want a game, it wanted a whaling operation.