Highguard Hits Nearly 100,000 Concurrent Players on Steam at Launch

Highguard, the new free-to-play multiplayer shooter from Wildlight Entertainment, hit nearly 100,000 players on Steam at launch on Monday. The game, which shot into limelight after it was shown as the final reveal at The Game Awards 2025, launched on PS5, PC, and Xbox Series S/X on January 26. Despite a healthy concurrent player base on launch day, reviews of the game remained negative on Steam.

Highguard Hits Nearly 100,000 Players on Steam

According to SteamDB, Highguard reached a peak concurrent player count of 97,249 on Monday. The player numbers, however, declined sharply the next day, with the game registering a peak concurrent player count of just over 19,000 on Tuesday. At the time of writing, Steam concurrent player count of Highguard hovered just under 10,000.

While the multiplayer title amassed a healthy player base on day one, it was bombarded with negative reviews on Steam. The reception of the game on the platform sits at “Mostly Negative” after more than 19,000 reviews.

Backlash After Reveal

Highguard developer Wildlight followed a curious marketing strategy, where it maintained radio silence on the game following its reveal at The Game Awards 2025. Geoff Keighley, the producer, creator, and host of The Game Awards, introduced Highguard as the final reveal at the event in December. After the announcement, the game faced backlash from players who saw it as yet another free-to-play shooter in the mould of Concord or Overwatch.

On January 26, Wildlight premiered a launch showcase, featuring a deep dive into Highguard gameplay and insights from developers. Highguard is a PvP raid shooter where players take on the roles of uniquely powered Wardens, compete to secure objectives, and raid the enemy base.

The roster of Wardens come with distict guns, raid tools, and guns and raid tools, and magical abilities, each suited to 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 with five maps, six bases, eight wardens, three mounts, ten weapons, and three raid tools. Wildlight has also shared a post-launch roadmap for the multiplayer title, confirming that episode 2 content will launch in two weeks.

On Tuesday, Wildlight thanked fans for playing Highguard and said it would be rolling out an update to address stability issues.

“Thank you to everyone who has jumped in and explored Highguard so far. As an FYI, tonight, we'll be pushing out a client update for all platforms to address various stability issues. We're continuing to investigate issues and expect to have more patches throughout the week,” the official Highguard account on X posted.

On Wednesday, Wildlight said it was working to add highly requested features like FoV sliders for consoles, toggle settings for ADS and crouch, and more graphics scaling options for PC. The studio confirmed it was targeting a new patch for Thursday. Highguard is available to play for free on PC (via Steam), PS5, and Xbox Series S/X.