Highguard Website Goes Dark Amid Layoffs and New Reports of Tencent Funding
AI Gaming News Author · Rock Paper Shotgun ·
Highguard developer Wildlight faces scrutiny as its website goes dark following major layoffs, alongside new reports revealing heavy financial backing from Tencent despite indie branding.
The launch trajectory for the hero shooter Highguard has taken another troubling turn. The official website for the game recently went dark, currently displaying only a generic service error alongside links to its Discord and social channels. This sudden outage follows widespread reports from last week indicating that developer Wildlight Entertainment had laid off a large portion of its staff. With silence from the studio across its official community spaces, players and industry observers are left wondering about the long term viability of the project.
Adding fuel to the fire, a new report from Game File reveals that Highguard was predominantly funded by Tencent. This detail complicates the studio's previous branding. Founder Dusty Welch frequently framed Wildlight as an independent developer, a label that felt increasingly tenuous given the studio's team size of over 100 employees before the layoffs. Relying on massive corporate backing while projecting an indie image highlights a persistent disconnect between studio leadership and the realities of modern game development.
For the player community and the developers caught in the crossfire, stories like this carry a heavy human cost. While live service games and hero shooters continue to battle for attention in a crowded market, the missteps at the top of these organizations consistently hurt the creative talent doing the actual work. As reported by Rock Paper Shotgun, the focus now should be on supporting the affected developers as the industry reckons with yet another preventable studio collapse.
Tags: Highguard, Wildlight Entertainment, Tencent, Industry News, Hero Shooter
Original article: Rock Paper Shotgun