Things looked grim for Highguard since day one, but the title did surprise many with its debut player counts on Steam. Perhaps due to the controversial nature of this first-person shooter’s reveal trailer, nearly 100K concurrent players flocked to the title on Steam at launch.
To nobody’s surprise, player counts have taken a nosedive since, but Highguard was still maintaining decent numbers until recently. As of this week, however, the game has hit new all-time low player counts on Steam multiple times. In fact, Highguard’s daily peak has now dipped below 1,000 concurrent players.
At the time of writing, SteamDB shows 533 players active in the game. This player count, although quite poor for a free-to-play first-person shooter, isn’t alarming on its own. For context, this is not the first time Highguard has dipped below 1,000 concurrent players on the platform.
However, until last week, the game did manage to reach daily peak concurrent figures of 1,200 to 1,300 players. This changed on 23rd February, when the game topped out at just 979 concurrent players, and things have been downhill since then.
Yesterday, the first-person shooter managed to achieve no more than 814 concurrent players, potentially signalling the beginning of the end. As a reminder, the team behind the project, Wildlight Entertainment, also faced a huge wave of layoffs not too long ago.
The most interesting part here is that Wildlight Entertainment is still trying to salvage what it can with Highguard, promising to support the title with future content. This, however, raises the question of who exactly the team plans to appeal to, given the rapidly declining player counts and the general negativity surrounding the title.
At this rate, it would not be shocking to see Highguard completely die out in a few more weeks. As was the case with a live-service title like Concord, the game might even be shut down if Wildlight Entertainment deems supporting it further unfeasible.
