Highguard Players Braced For Shutdown As Website Goes Dark

1 hour ago 9

Published Feb 17, 2026, 4:00 PM EST

Ben Brosofsky has been writing for Screen Rant since 2022 and editing since 2024. He graduated from Vanderbilt University with a Bachelor's in Cinema & Media Arts. Writing serves as a much-needed distraction from tackling a backlog of Steam games that will never be surmounted.

The signs have never been great for Highguard, and the latest update to the website might be the worst news yet. While the new hero shooter comes courtesy of some developers behind the hit Titanfall games, it struggled to win over fans with its reveal at the climax of The Game Awards 2025. If its release on January 26 ended up stunning players, Highguard might have been able to overcome that stumble, but reception so far has been mixed.

Today, the Highguard website went down, as spotted by X user Rebs Gaming. In place of the typical homepage, playhighguard.com simply features the game's logo, a "Site Unavailable" message, and a suggestion to contact support for assistance. So far, Highguard social media accounts remain silent regarding the website downtime.

Highguard's Website Outage Is Scaring Fans

No Explanation In Sight

Una in Highguard, wearing a red and white horned mask.

While Highguard's Site Unavailable message is better than a blank 404 page, it may not bode well for the game's future. In the comments of Rebs Gaming's posts, fans and critics of Highguard alike are already thinking this could be the beginning of the end. Hadigan1633 is convinced that "servers are next," and AFC begs for developer Wildlight Entertainment to "keep servers up for at least 2-3 months."

For fans, fears of Highguard's imminent shutdown are likely stoked by the swift demise of hero shooter Concord in 2024, which announced its shutdown only a week and a half after release. Highguard, however, has the advantage of being free-to-play, meaning it should be easier to sustain a manageable player base.

Things Aren't Looking Great For Highguard

This Could Be Another Concord

Slade snapping as fire rains down in Highguard.

Even so, the numbers aren't optimistic. According to SteamDB, Highguard's peak in the past 24 hours was 1,608 concurrent players, a dramatic step down from its launch peak of 97,249. For comparison, Team Fortress 2 is still able to pull in over 50,000 concurrent players nearly two decades after its release. Paladins, a more modest hero shooter hit, is averaging the same player numbers as Highguard over nine years after its early access release.

The website shutdown may be the result of recent layoffs at developer Wildlight Entertainment, which could have affected the support team for the website. At the time of layoffs, the Wildlight X account asserted that "a core group of developers" would remain to "continue innovating on and supporting the game."

Hopefully, the team behind Highguard will take to social media to clear the air about the website shutdown soon. Whatever the future might hold for the struggling hero shooter, it'll be better to have some hard answers.