The day has finally come, one that many had been expecting for quite some time. Highguard has just announced that it will shutdown on March 12. This comes as a surprise to basically no one at this point, given a very rough launch, dwindling numbers, negative reviews, and staff layoffs.
The Death of Highguard
Overall, the full Highguard shutdown really isn’t a shocker, with many fans questioning its longevity even minutes after the trailer dropped at the Game Awards. But now with the game’s full shutdown, there’s a lot to walk through on how all of this happened.
Highguard debuted at The Game Awards as the final trailer of the night, and later revealed it never planned or even paid for that closing spot. In the weeks leading up to launch, there was zero advertising, which, instead of building hype, made gamers believe this was going to be a repeat of Concord.
Finally, when launch day arrived, players flooded the servers for a few hours before the overall player count dropped significantly. While some players did, in fact, like the mixture of hero shooter, FPS, and MOBA elements, the majority thought it tried to use too many concepts that ultimately didn’t blend well.
Despite initially pushing out a roadmap to showcase they were initially ready to provide new content every single month, this confidence didn’t last long. Within a few weeks, a large part of the staff was laid off, followed by a deleted post from Josh Sobel, who has now deleted his X account entirely, just days after publishing an article blaming gamers for Highguard’s failure.
Additional sources also say that Tencent was secretly funding Highguard, which may be why it was able to stay afloat for a little bit.
The Final Hours
However, despite the Highguard full shutdown on March 12, the developers will still push out one more update that introduces a new Warden, a new weapon, account-level progression, and skill trees. So if you want to experience Highguard for the first or last time, before the servers shut down, you have a little over a month from the time of writing to jump in before the servers close down forever.
Was Highguard’s eventual downfall a result of the heavy push from the Game Awards, or was the studio not ready for this amount of criticism? We may never know.
