Highguard is here, and it seems to be a hit – at least, at first. It has been released by Wildlight Entertainment just a few weeks after the first trailer for the game was dropped at The Game Awards in December. This ‘new breed of shooter’ promises to be a stacked free-to-play title, and Wildlight has wasted no time publishing a year-long roadmap for the game.
What’s more impressive is that, within a single hour of being released, the game skyrocketed to half a million concurrent viewers between Twitch and YouTube, and the number is rapidly growing.
Maybe It’s a Success After All
Highguard was always going to be one of those games that pulled in viewers, given how much mystery the title was shrouded in ahead of release. It was put on a pedestal by Geoff Keighley during The Game Awards, and critics everywhere already declared it a write-off because it bore similarities to other, failed games.
Now that it has been released worldwide, it’s pulling in some remarkable figures. Between Twitch and YouTube (at the time of writing), Highguard had secured a concurrent viewer count of 480,000 users. It rapidly overtook every game on both platforms to secure their respective top spots.
The player count on Steam also climbed at a rapid pace. One hour after launch, almost 100,000 concurrent users were logged in and playing, and that’s while half the world was still at work on a Monday afternoon, and the other half was fast asleep.
Nobody anticipated Highguard to come out of the gate with such strength, but it’s a testament to the hold-out-and-hope marketing model that Wildlight Entertainment employed ahead of the game’s release.
Do you intend to give Highguard a try? Let us know what you think about the game on the Insider Gaming Discord server.
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news that a one-year roadmap has been revealed for Highguard
Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
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