Highguard: How To Lose $200M In 45 Days
mrixrt
264,785 views
Highguard launched with 97,249 players on January 26, 2026 and was gone 45 days later. Here's where the $200 million actually went. Thanks to Bezi for sponsoring this video https://www.bezi.com/?utm_source=yout...
Wildlight Entertainment was founded in 2022 by Respawn alumni Dusty Welch, Chad Grenier, and Jason McCord. They recruited more than sixty veterans of Apex Legends, Titanfall, and Call of Duty and publicly claimed the studio was independent and self-funded. It was not. Reporting from Eurogamer and TweakTown identified Tencent’s TiMi Studio Group as the primary backer, and the $200 million was not an investment. It was a performance-based loan with strict retention gates: Day 1, Day 7, and Day 30 targets taken directly from the mobile model behind Honor of Kings. Highguard peaked at 97,249 concurrent players, far below the 150,000 requirement, meaning it failed on launch night. Tencent pulled funding on day 16. More than eighty employees lost their jobs without notice, and by April 2026 multiple law firms had opened WARN Act investigations.
This video breaks down the collapse. The 2024 pivot from a Rust-style survival shooter to a 3v3 raid format kept massive maps built for sixty players, leaving matches with long stretches of empty gameplay. The meta broke quickly, with Shieldbreaker kiting, self-capping, respawn timer abuse, and Perfect Melee exploits dominating. Technical issues piled up: an engine designed for destructible survival struggling at 80 FPS, TAA blur that obscured Atticus’s lightning spears, and desync on Shieldbreaker spawns that split player states. Marketing compounded the damage. Geoff Keighley pushed the game into The Game Awards finale slot instead of a shadow drop, a slot many viewers expected to reveal Half-Life 3. That was followed by six weeks of silence as the game became a meme. Another issue went undisclosed: Tencent SVP Steven Ma sits on The Game Awards advisory board, and a Tencent-backed game received the show’s most valuable placement.
The final twist came on March 17, five days after shutdown, when Sony automatically refunded every PlayStation 5 microtransaction, battle pass, and cosmetic tied to Highguard. A free-to-play game ended with a total customer balance of zero. $200 million spent, nothing returned.
We'll go over:
Why did Highguard shut down after only 45 days?
Who actually funded Wildlight Entertainment, and why did the "independent studio" story fall apart?
How do Tencent and TiMi's retention kill switches work, and what were Highguard's exact targets?
Why did Geoff Keighley put Highguard in The Game Awards finale slot, and did Tencent's board seat play a role?
Is Highguard worse than Concord?
Did Highguard players get refunds?
Written, Edited, & Narrated by MRIXRT
Additional Footage @MykonosFan & @CrubOfficial
Concord: How to Lose $200 Million in 12 Days | Concord: How to Lose $200M in 12 Days
The Problem with The Game Awards Jury | The Problem with The Game Awards Jury
Sources: https://rentry.co/highguard-game
#highguard #mrixrt #reallycool
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0:00 The Forty-Five Day Supernova
2:58 The Pedigree Trap: "We Made Apex Legends"
7:02 The Corpse: A Timeline of Collapse
8:54 Sponsor: Bezi
10:00 Follow the Money: The Tencent Kill Switch
16:23 The Pivot: Genre Soup and the Latvian Map Problem
19:33 Meta-Tactics: Trolling as Strategy
23:22 Technical Debt: Built for a Different Game
26:50 The Game Awards Disaster and Six Weeks of Silence
37:07 The Admission: "We Ran Out of Time and Money"
39:51 The Episode 2 Paradox
42:35 Why Highguard Is the Scarier Failure
46:42 Innovation on Life Support
49:55 The Postmortem
Thank you for reading, tell me you did & comment about penguins
Highguard: How To Lose $200M In 45 Days
Highguard: How To Lose $200M In 45 Days
MRIXRT
reallycool
20 Comments
Honestly, I forgot about Highguard. And the fact that it even came and went this year.
Amazing video!
You replace one member from that band, or follow a member to another, the music will not sound the same.
One simply cannot tout they worked on a game as a sign they'll make something like it
But like you said, Highguard did find its audience, and was rejected by it. And it also doesn't help the YouTubers who I saw going to bat for Highguard were also the types to get flown out to product premieres.
And then he pulls out a revolver.
Highguard: How To Lose $200M In 45 Days
mrixrt
264,785 views
Highguard launched with 97,249 players on January 26, 2026 and was gone 45 days later. Here's where the $200 million actually went. Thanks to Bezi for sponsoring this video https://www.bezi.com/?utm_source=yout...
Wildlight Entertainment was founded in 2022 by Respawn alumni Dusty Welch, Chad Grenier, and Jason McCord. They recruited more than sixty veterans of Apex Legends, Titanfall, and Call of Duty and publicly claimed the studio was independent and self-funded. It was not. Reporting from Eurogamer and TweakTown identified Tencent’s TiMi Studio Group as the primary backer, and the $200 million was not an investment. It was a performance-based loan with strict retention gates: Day 1, Day 7, and Day 30 targets taken directly from the mobile model behind Honor of Kings. Highguard peaked at 97,249 concurrent players, far below the 150,000 requirement, meaning it failed on launch night. Tencent pulled funding on day 16. More than eighty employees lost their jobs without notice, and by April 2026 multiple law firms had opened WARN Act investigations.
This video breaks down the collapse. The 2024 pivot from a Rust-style survival shooter to a 3v3 raid format kept massive maps built for sixty players, leaving matches with long stretches of empty gameplay. The meta broke quickly, with Shieldbreaker kiting, self-capping, respawn timer abuse, and Perfect Melee exploits dominating. Technical issues piled up: an engine designed for destructible survival struggling at 80 FPS, TAA blur that obscured Atticus’s lightning spears, and desync on Shieldbreaker spawns that split player states. Marketing compounded the damage. Geoff Keighley pushed the game into The Game Awards finale slot instead of a shadow drop, a slot many viewers expected to reveal Half-Life 3. That was followed by six weeks of silence as the game became a meme. Another issue went undisclosed: Tencent SVP Steven Ma sits on The Game Awards advisory board, and a Tencent-backed game received the show’s most valuable placement.
The final twist came on March 17, five days after shutdown, when Sony automatically refunded every PlayStation 5 microtransaction, battle pass, and cosmetic tied to Highguard. A free-to-play game ended with a total customer balance of zero. $200 million spent, nothing returned.
We'll go over:
Why did Highguard shut down after only 45 days?
Who actually funded Wildlight Entertainment, and why did the "independent studio" story fall apart?
How do Tencent and TiMi's retention kill switches work, and what were Highguard's exact targets?
Why did Geoff Keighley put Highguard in The Game Awards finale slot, and did Tencent's board seat play a role?
Is Highguard worse than Concord?
Did Highguard players get refunds?
Written, Edited, & Narrated by MRIXRT
Additional Footage @MykonosFan & @CrubOfficial
Concord: How to Lose $200 Million in 12 Days | Concord: How to Lose $200M in 12 Days
The Problem with The Game Awards Jury | The Problem with The Game Awards Jury
Sources: https://rentry.co/highguard-game
#highguard #mrixrt #reallycool
----------------------------------------------------------------
This video, and all others on this channel, are made possible because of YOUR support, and I appreciate your generosity
----------------------------------------------------------------
•Patreon: Support me with a monthly subscription (I receive 95%) and you get Discord roles and add your name at the end of my videos |Patreon: reallycool
•YouTube Member: Support me with a monthly subscription (I receive 70%) and you get Discord roles and add your name at the end of my videos, plus emotes here on YouTube |https://youtube.com/ReallyCool/join
----------------------------------------------------------------
I get commissions or benefits for purchases made through the links below
► Buy MRIXRT Merch |https://crymor.tv/merch
► Use Tag REALLYCOOL on the Epic Games Store!
FOLLOW MRIXRT
► Subscribe |https://youtube.com/ReallyCool?sub_co...
► Discord |https://crymor.tv/discord
► Twitter |Twitter: MRIXRT
► Twitch |Twitch: MRIXRT
► Crub Podcast | @CrubOfficial
0:00 The Forty-Five Day Supernova
2:58 The Pedigree Trap: "We Made Apex Legends"
7:02 The Corpse: A Timeline of Collapse
8:54 Sponsor: Bezi
10:00 Follow the Money: The Tencent Kill Switch
16:23 The Pivot: Genre Soup and the Latvian Map Problem
19:33 Meta-Tactics: Trolling as Strategy
23:22 Technical Debt: Built for a Different Game
26:50 The Game Awards Disaster and Six Weeks of Silence
37:07 The Admission: "We Ran Out of Time and Money"
39:51 The Episode 2 Paradox
42:35 Why Highguard Is the Scarier Failure
46:42 Innovation on Life Support
49:55 The Postmortem
Thank you for reading, tell me you did & comment about penguins
Highguard: How To Lose $200M In 45 Days
Highguard: How To Lose $200M In 45 Days
MRIXRT
reallycool
Now for my notes: This didn't make the video and I keep thinking about it.
Highguard's reviews weren't bad. 63 on Metacritic for PC, 62 on PS5, 39% of critics recommending it on OpenCritic. GameSpot gave it a 6. PC Gamer gave it a 65. Push Square gave it a 6. So if you're wondering whether the game was actually terrible, it wasn't. It was mediocre. Most critics who played it came away thinking it was alright with some real problems.
Then look at the Steam user reviews. Mostly Negative.
Critics played review builds against other critics for a few days. Players played it against a community that solved the meta in about a day and then spent the next month stalling into overtime. You don't find that in a review window. It turns up in week two, which is exactly when the money was getting counted.
And the survivors mostly launched worse. Destiny got a 76 in 2014 and everyone called it a disappointment. No Man's Sky was a punchline for years. Final Fantasy XIV launched so badly that Square Enix pulled it off the internet and rebuilt it from scratch as A Realm Reborn. All of those got years. Highguard got 45 days. Nothing in the scores tells you which one you're going to be. Who's funding you does.
Concord peaked at 700 players, so there the numbers explain themselves. Highguard had 97,249 people turn up and reviews in the "yeah, it's fine" range and it still died faster than almost anything in the genre. Fine used to be survivable. LawBreakers, Anthem, Babylon's Fall, Skull and Bones, Suicide Squad, Hyenas cancelled before it even shipped. Most of that graveyard is games that were fine.
If you played it, what would you have given it out of ten?