A Bloomberg report by Jason Schreier says Wildlight Entertainment staff believed they had months to turn things around, but Tencent pulled the project’s funding – a decision that immediately changed what Highguard could realistically survive.
Some failures make sense from the outside, but are far harder to accept from within. Highguard, the free-to-play PvP shooter that launched last month after getting a marketing push from Geoff Keighley, hasn’t performed well. Even after losing most of its players, the game appeared to keep moving forward as a service – until the situation shifted, a large portion of Wildlight was laid off, and the reason behind the cuts became clearer.
According to Schreier’s reporting, the story isn’t only about player drop-off. It’s also about money disappearing overnight. The studio had spent years presenting itself as self-funded, without publicly detailing where the capital came from. In reality, Tencent was Wildlight Entertainment’s primary financier, and the relationship was kept secret.
Tencent Cut Off The Funding
The report, based on conversations with ten former employees, suggests the team believed it had enough runway to recover from a rocky launch. Highguard released on January 26 and came close to 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, but the numbers fell quickly. In less than three weeks, around 90% of those players were gone, and microtransaction revenue – effectively the only meaningful income stream for a free-to-play game – was close to nonexistent.
Inside Wildlight, the expectation was that the studio could spend several months applying updates, responding to player feedback, and trying to win back thousands of users. Instead, on February 11, management told staff in a meeting that Tencent had withdrawn its funding.
No reason was given, but the practical conclusion is straightforward: the deal likely included player or revenue targets that Highguard came nowhere near meeting. Without that money, the studio was left exposed. Roughly 100 people were previously in place to improve Highguard; now fewer than 20 remain, and the next step could be the full closure of both the game and the studio.
Source: 3DJuegos
