If anything succeeds these days, of course it's going to have to be a franchise. It's probably worth preparing for ahead of time, really, which is what the developers at Wildlight Entertainment reportedly did leading up to the release of Highguard. Of course, they didn't expect things to go the way they did, with funding being pulled and most of the team being laid off just weeks after launch.
As per a new report from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, the team at Wildlight were "itching" to create a single-player story game set in the world of Highguard. It was compared to how Titanfall wowed everyone with its multiplayer, then with the sequel brought in a well-regarded single-player campaign, too.
Sadly, that wasn't to be. Schreier says there's now around 20 people working on the game, where there was once a team of 100 at Wildlight. Tencent, the game's secret backer, has pulled funding as Highguard failed to meet player retention metrics.
There were multiple factors leading to Highguard's downfall, but it seems the main message gamers will take away is that once again new live-service releases are failing to meet the incredibly high demands of the saturated market.