Less than 20 people reportedly remain at Highguard developer Wildlight Entertainment following last month’s layoffs.
That’s according to Bloomberg, which spoke with 10 former Wildlight employees about the game’s development and troubled launch.
Sources said an all-hands meeting took place on February 11, during which staff were allegedly told “the studio was out of money and most of their 100-person team would be laid off.”
Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group reportedly served as the “lead financial backer” of Wildlight, which formed in 2023 as a “fully funded” studio.
Wildlight CEO and co-founder Dusty Welch previously said the developer was an “independent studio without the support of a big organisation.”
As Bloomberg reports, “staff were left with the impression that their financing was contingent upon hitting certain metrics, such as retention rate, which they’d failed to even come close to achieving.”
Wildlight CEO Welch and Tencent declined to provide Bloomberg with comment.
When Highguard launched on January 26, it peaked at nearly 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, with similar numbers on console. A week after release, it “lost roughly 90% of its players.”
When asked what went wrong with Highguard’s launch, former devs said leadership “thought that they could emulate what had worked in the past with Apex Legends, no matter how much the gaming landscape had changed since then.”
According to devs, “reactions from testers were mostly positive, but there may have been blind spots in the process.”
When the idea of taking the game into early access was suggested, leadership reportedly rejected it, wanting to recreate the successful shadow drop of Apex Legends.
Wildlight was co-founded by a group of former Respawn Entertainment devs. CEO Welch was formerly COO and GM of Apex Legends, which launched on the day it was announced in 2019.
