The Game That Went Viral at The Game Awards 2025 Is Now Shutting Down Its Servers

One of the world’s most prestigious video game award events, The Game Awards (TGA), traditionally ends with a trailer for a highly anticipated title. At TGA 2025 in December, the trailer shown was Highguard, developed by the American independent studio Wildlight Entertainment. Highguard is a shooter with RPG elements, reminiscent of Apex Legends, Overwatch, and Valorant.

The game, which generated significant hype on the TGA stage, launched on 26 January 2026 and is free to play on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. This week, Wildlight Entertainment said Highguard has been played by more than 2 million people. Despite the large player base claims, the developer—founded largely by former Respawn Entertainment employees, creators of Apex Legends—decided to retire the game after a short period.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter) under the handle @PlayHighguard, Wildlight Entertainment confirmed that Highguard’s servers would close on 12 March 2026. In other words, the game will have lasted roughly 45 days, or about a month from its initial launch. So what are the reasons for the closure?

“Despite the passion and hard work of our team, we have not managed to build a sustainable player base to support the game in the long term,” Wildlight Entertainment said.

Before the shutdown, the developers released one final update on 5 March 2026 introducing a new character alias ‘Warden,’ a new weapon, an account progression system, and a skill-tree progression feature.

“Servers will remain online until 12 March. We hope you will come back to play with us one more time to show your support and enjoy the final exciting matches while you still can,” Wildlight Entertainment concluded.

Wildlight Entertainment’s statements about the server closure point to the current player numbers, which are not as high as at launch. On Steam, concurrent players after the first week reached only 15,000, down from 97,000 at launch.