Highguard Player Numbers Drop 96% in Four Days

Wildlight Entertainment's hero shooter Highguard has well and truly become the first – and, sadly, likely not the last – video game of 2026 to sharply divide the gaming community, with one side likening it to MindsEye and The Day Before, and the other going to extreme – sometimes absurdly so – lengths to shield it from criticism.

And while the latter group enjoys the backing of some AAA developers and legacy gaming media, the former has the numbers on its side – numbers showing that, in the eyes of most gamers, Highguard remains a nay rather than a yay.

According to SteamDB data, after debuting with 97,249 concurrent players at its peak on the release date, Highguard has now lost almost 96% of its playerbase in less than four days, falling to under 4,000 players at the time of writing.

While sure, some player drop-off is indeed expected over time, the speed and scale of this decline are abnormal compared to any other hero shooter, suggesting that the initial surge was likely driven by social media hype in the days before release and the fact that the game is free-to-play, allowing everyone to see what the fuss was about.

The situation isn't much brighter on the ratings front, with Highguard currently sitting at just 2.2/10 on Metacritic. While this extremely low score is likely influenced by recency bias and an overreacting community, and, in all honesty, probably shouldn't be that low, the fact that The Game Awards 2025 headliner now ranks below the second-worst game of 2025, the aforementioned MindsEye, speaks volumes about the scale of the backlash the title has faced.

At the same time, not all of Highguard's numbers have tumbled like a rock off a cliff, with at least one metric showing some growth. Over the past couple of days, the game's Steam rating has improved from Mostly Negative to Mixed, and while it's still barely holding on at just 40% positivity score, it's no longer in the red zone – so perhaps fewer players will be scared off and more will actually try the game before judging it.

Despite the criticism, Wildlight appears to be handling the situation in a healthy, No Man's Sky-esque way, addressing negative feedback with post-launch patches that fix crashes and bugs, add new features and settings, and generally improve the Highguard experience. Whether this effort will be enough to change perceptions – or if the game was disliked because of its very nature, something that can't be fixed – remains to be seen.

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