Ex Highguard developers blame “hubris” for the game’s failure in new report, with studio leaders convinced they had another Apex Legends on their hands

The story of Highguard reads like a fever dream, marked by an oddly timed Game Awards trailer, surprisingly encouraging player numbers at launch, a flurry of large-scale updates, and then, just weeks after launch, the abrupt laying off of most of the development team.

The game isn’t dead and in fact is still getting updates presumably from a skeleton crew, but articles that read like in memoriam notices are already starting to appear. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, for example, has a new report with the headline ‘The Story Behind the Failure of Highguard’, in which the veteran journalist talked to 10 former employees of Wildlight about “one of 2026’s first gaming disasters — the sudden collapse of Wildlight Entertainment and its first game, Highguard.”