Highguard, 2026's First Contentious Title, Shows a Weak Start

We waited for it, we wanted it, we questioned its TGA 2025 trailer and the team's subsequent silence, and now it's finally here.

Highguard, Wildlight Entertainment's hero shooter with the weirdest marketing campaign we've seen in a while and the title of 2026's first truly contentious release, has officially launched, proving through its launch numbers that the Streisand effect and Geoff Keighley's borderline-sycophantic volume of promotional posts aren't enough on their own to spark the real, lasting interest from the gaming community in your title.

Immediately after its launch, one could easily assume that gamers' general vibe about Highguard was way off, and that the game would surely join the ranks of Overwatch, Marvel Rivals, and other hero-shooters-that-could, with player counts rising through its first hour and nearly reaching 100,000 concurrent players on Steam.

What initially looked like the first sign of success, however, turned out to be nothing more than a mix of players checking out what all the online fuss was about and Highguard's free-to-play status. After peaking at 97K on Steam, the game's player numbers began tumbling by an enormous margin, dropping more than 80% within the next few hours and now sitting below 17K concurrent users, shedding hundreds of players every minute (it was 20K when I started writing this article and 18K when I began this paragraph).

Although it's, of course, absolutely normal for any game to lose relevance over time and struggle to ever surpass the numbers boosted by launch-day hype, the sheer speed at which Highguard lost over 80% of its player count – in less than 24 hours – is nothing short of anomalous when compared to any other hero shooter: Overwatch, Marvel Rivals, Apex Legends, Rainbow Six Siege, Deadlock, pick your poison.

From optimization problems and the presence of a kernel-level anti-cheat that requires manual removal, to the game's art style, gameplay, characters, gunplay, and the painfully long loading times many players endured at launch – it's virtually impossible to pinpoint exactly what went wrong, with players seemingly lambasting every single aspect of Highguard. That said, the overall sentiment mirrors the reaction to the trailer I mentioned earlier, that Highguard tried to cram too many ideas together, ultimately forgetting that mixing all the colors of the rainbow only results in brown.

Speaking of loading times, some have also noted that it's possible Wildlight wasn't prepared for their game to receive so much attention – suggesting, assuming the studio's earlier claims about not paying a single extra dime to become The Game Awards 2025’s headliner were genuine and not damage control, Geoff Keighley bears some responsibility for the game's poor performance, having recently gone above and beyond in his attempt to promote the release.

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