Highguard studio Wildlight is down to fewer than 20 staff after layoffs

Wildlight Entertainment, the studio behind Highguard, reportedly has fewer than 20 people left after last month’s layoffs. The claim comes from a Bloomberg report that spoke with 10 former Wildlight employees about the game’s development and rough launch.

According to Bloomberg, an all-hands meeting on February 11 allegedly told staff the studio was out of money and that most of its roughly 100-person team would be laid off. Wildlight CEO and co-founder Dusty Welch and Tencent declined to comment to Bloomberg.

The report also says Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group acted as Wildlight’s “lead financial backer.” Wildlight formed in 2023 and was described at the time as “fully funded,” though Welch had previously characterized the company as an independent studio without support from a big organization.

Former staff told Bloomberg they believed the studio’s funding was tied to hitting performance targets like retention, and that Highguard didn’t come close. Highguard launched on January 26 and peaked at nearly 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, with similar numbers on console, but reportedly dropped about 90% of its playerbase a week later.

On what went wrong, ex-developers pointed to leadership trying to repeat the surprise-launch playbook that worked for Apex Legends, even as the market has shifted since 2019. They also said playtest feedback was mostly positive, but that there were blind spots. Bloomberg reports that an early access approach was suggested internally, but leadership rejected it in favor of attempting a shadow-drop style release.

Wildlight was founded by former Respawn Entertainment developers, and Welch previously served as COO and GM of Apex Legends.