Highguard Hits Nearly 100000 Concurrent Players on Steam at Launch

Wildlight Entertainment’s new free-to-play multiplayer shooter Highguard surpassed 100,000 players on Steam at launch Monday, with the game hitting nearly 100,000 games for its first season of steam. After it was aired as the last reveal of The Game Awards 2025, the game became known as “the game”, which launched on PS5, PC and Xbox Series S/X on January 26. Although a healthy concurrent player base was maintained on launch day, reviews of the game were negative for Steam and still negatively.

Highguard Hits Nearly 100,000 Players on Steam

Highguard reached a peak concurrent player count of 97,249 on Monday, SteamDB reported. Player numbers meanwhile, though they were sharply down the following morning, with Tuesday’s game posting a peak concurrent player count of just over 19,000 players. Highguard’s Steam concurrent player count was just under 10,000 at the time of writing, a record low for Steam concurr players.

The multiplayer title grew up with a healthy player base on day one, but it was heavily criticized by Steam critics while the game had negative reviews. With over 19,000 reviews of the game, it is re-released at “Mostly Negative” on the platform.

Backlash After Reveal

Highguard developer Wildlight embraced a curious marketing strategy, which kept the game radio silence after its announcement at The Game Awards 2025. Highguard is the final reveal at The Game Awards, which was announced in December by producer, creator and host of The game awards Geoff Keighley as a finale for the event’s closing reveal. Following the announcement, players who viewed the game as another free-to-play shooter in the mould of Concord or Overwatch saw it as yet another play gunman.

A launch show was presented on January 26, with a deep dive into Highguard gameplay and insights from developers. Highguard is a PvP raid shooter where players play the roles of uniquely powered Wardens, compete to secure objectives and raid the enemy base.

Wardens’ roster includes distict guns, raid tools and weapons (and even magical abilities) that were appropriate for a different gameplay loop of raid combat and destruction; siege stealth and infiltration; base repair and defense; harvesting and loot gathering; open-world combat; and more.

Highguard has launched five maps, six bases, eight wardens, three mounts and ten weapons as well as three raid tools. Wildlight has also released a roadmap for the multiplayer title’s post-launch, saying that episode 2 content will be available in two weeks.

Earlier Tuesday Wildlight thanked fans on Highguard for playing the game, saying it would be “rolling out an update to address stability issues” in response to support problems.

Thank you for all those who have jumped in and visited Highguard so far. A FYI, tonight we’re announcing that we will be updating clients for all platforms to address various stability issues. The official Highguard X posted the following week that we’re continuing to investigate problems, and expects there will be more patches throughout the week.

Wildlight said Wednesday it was “working to add very popular features such as FoV sliders for consoles, toggle settings for ADS and crouch” and more graphics scaling options for PC. A new patch for Thursday was targeted, the studio confirmed that it was targeting a new Patch. Highguard is free to play on PC (via Steam), PS5, and Xbox Series S/X.

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