Tencent Was Quietly Backing Highguard Studio, According to Report

Highguard, the free-to-play PvP “raid shooter” announced at The Game Awards last year and released to preemptive criticism and mockery only for most of its developers to be laid off just weeks after launch, was apparently financially backed by Tencent, according to a report.

This comes from Game File, which reports that the Chinese gaming mogul was the primary financial backer behind developer Wildlight Entertainment, an arrangement that was not publicly shared by either company.

Prior to this report, it was unclear who was funding Wildlight, despite Highguard seemingly being in development for a number of years prior to its announcement at The Game Awards in December. Its official LinkedIn page has long included the line that Wildlight is “a new, fully-funded entertainment studio.”

That grand announcement, its time and place instigated by The Game Awards host Geoff Keighley rather than the studio, sparked weeks of mockery online, with a number of content creators declaring the game dead before it had even released. Upon launch, Highguard netted nearly 100k Steam concurrents, but critic reviews (including ours) were just so-so and user scores were low. Just a few weeks later, developers from Wildlight revealed that most of them had been laid off. Since then, one developer who worked on the game has reflected that Highguard was “turned into a joke from minute one” due to false assumptions made from the TGA trailer, and a number of other high-profile developers have come to its defense.

It remains unclear how heavily reliant Wildlight was on Tencent, or whether a decision to pull funding was made at some point that led to the mass layoffs. Wildlight’s future as a studio also remains unclear, with a studio statement saying that it would retain a “core group of developers” to keep Highguard going. However, the game’s website went offline earlier today and has yet to be restored, leading some to speculate that the game or even the studio is about to fully shut down.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.