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It looks like the writing is on the wall for Wildlight Entertainment.
"Hello everyone and welcome back to another GRTV news. Today we have quite a, maybe not surprising but quite a big piece of news to talk about. I thought I was going to be talking today about perhaps Diablo and the fact that the Warlock is coming to Diablo 2, first bit of content in 25 years. But then something big happened overnight which you're probably quite familiar with at this point. Wild Light Entertainment, the developers of High Guard have basically laid off the majority of the staff. The launch has not been what the game needed to be, the build up to launch was not what the game needed to be and now the people who create the game are paying the price effectively. So let's dive in and have a look. So yes most of the developers of High Guard have been laid off. Seems like Wild Light Entertainment is weeks or months from being shut down. So it was the middle of the night here in Europe, millions of viewers were eagerly awaiting the last reveal at the Game Awards 2025. Could it be Half Life 3? The God of War team's next game? The follow up to Inside? The Elder Scrolls 6? Nope. Former developers of Titanfall 2 and Apex Legends unveiled High Guard, a multiplayer game that seemed a lot like many other games we see these days. We used to see these kind of shows ending with very exciting trailers so you could hear the disappointment of the crowd. Players across the world aired their opinions online and it seemed like the majority hated it. This made me believe that it was only a matter of time before tonight's announcement happened. Alex Greiner, one of High Guard's level designers, confirms that most of the developers at Wild Light Entertainment were laid off today. This definitely means that High Guard won't get as many changes and improvements as the developers have talked about since launch which means a miracle will have to happen for the game to still be online and available for sale in a year or two. Even if this was predictable it's obviously a shame to see people getting laid off especially after trying to save the game with not just one but two big updates. This and Concord really shows that making multiplayer games that can be called hero shooters is dangerous these days. Seems like extraction shooters are the new hotness now so it'll be interesting to see if Marathon has a better chance than many thought after the first tests. Wild Light has since confirmed these layoffs. They put out a statement which basically says that they are significantly reducing the size of the team. Again it's disappointing you don't want to ever see people lose their jobs especially in the video game sector which is just rampant with layoffs or has been over the years. But that being said you can see this one coming a mile away. A little bit of the responsibility needs to be put on Geoff Keighley's shoulders because the reports that people are hearing is that Keighley decides the flow of those shows and he decided that High Guard should be the last big reveal and it put a lot of pressure on a game that probably didn't need it. Then obviously it comes to Wild Light. You've got to have a marketing campaign. You've got to continue to tell people that your game's coming. You can't just put a trailer out in early December and then launch in mid to late January and expect people to show up. It doesn't work. You've got to give people reason to play your game. And I know they did their big influencer event but you can't just pay people to build a community. It has to become sort of naturally developed and that's not what this game did. So yeah very predictable this happened. I think I spoke about this in the last GR show podcast we did on Friday."
"It's just been that I'd be surprised if this game's around in a year and I really didn't expect this. I thought that we'd probably see news like this maybe late March early April that sort of time after the game's had a few months and they really sort of understand where they are. The proximity of this news to the launch tells me at least that the launch has been really poor. Like way worse than anyone would have expected and it's always difficult to tell how badly a game's launched or how well a game's launched because something can do really well on Steam but really poorly on consoles or it could do really well on consoles and really poorly on Steam. And the latter could have been the case with High Guard. It never really found success on Steam but the player base on console could have been really high. You never know, you can't really see that information, they never share the sort of firm data there. But you'd have to assume that a free to play game that's being where the developers are pretty much all losing their jobs a couple of weeks after launch, three weeks after launch I think, it hasn't had a good launch anywhere. So it's always harsh and it's always hard to see these kinds of news but again, as Eric says, I'm also not very surprised that it's come to this. Eric did mention in the piece actually that perhaps hero shooters are dangerous these days and that maybe extraction shooters are the new hotness. I don't think it's that, I think it's live service and I think you've got to be incredibly brave to launch a new live service game these days. I think that you started seeing this trend a couple of years ago. Concord was the big turning point where people really weren't sure that this was a brave idea anymore. But a couple of years ago with the Concord timeline we also had Hyenas that never even launched because Sega bottled it. Marathon might have a chance but that's because it's a Bungie game and Bungie still has that sort of allure to it really, that sort of pull that people want to experience a Bungie game. It might prove to be a really strong game and it might survive, it might not be as strong and it might struggle, it's hard to say. But there are a lot of upcoming live service games that I look at now and I think, I just don't see a future for them."
"And it's because people have limited time. People have a finite amount of time to commit to video games and these live service games, they don't demand 18, 15, 20, 25 hours, maybe even if it's a big RPG, 50-75 hours. They don't demand that, they demand all of your time. And it's the case with, you have to combine that with the fact that these live service games, they all compete with one another. So High Guard for example isn't just trying to build it's own community, it's trying to snatch a community away from the established titans like Apex Legends, like Overwatch, like Rainbow Six Siege, like Counter Strike, PUBG, Battlegrounds, Fortnite, all these other games that have established communities that like what they do and they stay around for them and have stayed around for them for years and years. You have to be incredibly brave or incredibly confident about what you're putting forward if you think that you're going to be able to find a spot on it. And in a manner of speaking, Arc Raiders is one of the worst things that the live service genre could have offered because it succeeded. And now developers are going to look at it, or maybe publishers are going to look at Arc Raiders and go, we want our Arc Raiders. And they're going to again throw money at it. But I look at some of the things that's coming up and I don't know whether Sony can ever launch fair games. It's a game that they've barely marketed. It's a game that we barely know anything about. And I don't think that game has much of a chance considering how Concord fared, considering how High Guard fared and how Fair Games is on the horizon at some point. I'm not sure about that. And Horizon, I can never remember the game, Something Gathering. Again, it has the Horizon brand attached to it. But Horizon's not, it's not some golden goose that you put a Horizon game out and it instantly gets 20 million sold copies. It's a popular series. But if anyone, if you look at Horizon Call of the Mountain, you look at Lego Horizon Adventures, they're two games that they did fine. But a live service game can't do fine. It has to do incredibly well. It has to be really strong and it has to develop a really dedicated community that want to be around for it. And I just don't think that there's much space for these games anymore. So we'll stay tuned and we'll see how it goes in the future. But I think the thing we can take from this High Guard news is that it's probably not too long until Wild Light closes its doors because now that they've lost so many developers, High Guard isn't going to receive the content it needs to have a chance at getting back on Interform. And likewise, if it doesn't draw players, it's not going to make any money and it's a free to play game, which means that you'd have to assume the writing's on the wall for the studio. So another side bit of news to start the day, but one that I think a lot of us could kind of see coming in a way. But again, I'll be back now tomorrow for the next GRT News of the Week. It'll probably be about tonight's state of play, so stay tuned for that. Maybe Fair Games will show up. That'd be bold, wouldn't it? But until then, thank you for joining me and I'll see you all on that one."
