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Video game Highguard axed weeks after release

Georgia Levy-CollinsBBC Newsbeat
News imageWildlight Entertainment Cover artwork for Highguard, showing three characters. In the centre, a male character wearing a silver suit of armour roars victoriously as he grabs a large, magical sword planted in the ground in front of him. To the left of the picture, a masked barbarian character rides a polar bear while pointing a pistol at an unseen enemy. To the right, a hooded, female character crouches as she points a rifle at a distant foe.Wildlight Entertainment
Highguard was created by a team who had worked on Call of Duty

Multiplayer shooter video game Highguard will "permanently shut down" just weeks after its release, its developer has announced.

Since its launch in January, the free-to-play game has struggled to retain players despite being made by a team of games industry veterans who worked on successful titles such as Call of Duty, Apex Legends and Titanfall.

Multiple staff members were also laid off by the developers just two weeks after it went live.

In a statement, developers Wildlight Entertainment announced the servers will halt on 12 March as they had "not been able to build a sustainable player base to support the game long term".

The hero shooter game was first announced in December at The Game Awards ceremony during the end-of-show preview slot, traditionally saved for games set to make a big splash.

But some fans questioned if the game would be a success, complaining that the trailer lacked a proper explanation of how the game worked.

Despite being a PC, PlayStation and Xbox game, the numbers didn't reach what developers expected.

Plummeting player numbers

After it was released on 26 January, it drew in just under 100,000 players on PC and about 380,000 viewers on streaming site Twitch, according to data-tracking website SteamDB.

However, it was downhill from there, with the game attracting just 3,600 concurrent PC users on the day Wildlight Entertainment announced the layoffs in February.

One the day it was announced the game was being axed it saw a peak of 460 users, according to SteamDB.

Following the news the game would be shelved, some fans expressed their dissapointment, while others questioned the decision after developers previously said they had a year's worth of updates mapped out.

In the statement, developers asked fans to "jump in with us one more time to show your support and get those final great matches in while we still can".

"From all of us at Wildlight, thank you for playing, for supporting us, and for being part of Highguard's story," they added.

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