Highguard boss says the player count “doesn’t matter”

Highguard boss Chad Grenier insists it “doesn’t matter” how many people play the game, and that it’s important that those who do love it.

In an interview with Polygon, leading devs from Wildlight Entertainment, which is made up of around 60 employees who worked on Apex Legends and Titanfall, shed light on some of the team’s thought processes during development. They explained that they had new competitive shooter pitches every day before settling on what would eventually become Highguard.

After years of “wild exploration,” game director and studio head Chad Grenier believes they’ve landed on a format that is totally unique.

“I don’t think that there’s a game out there that is like ours,” he said. “I think there are games out there that have elements that you’ll see in our game, but I honestly feel that nothing out there is a similar experience.”

Highguard boss cares more about the game being “loved”

However, it’s fair to say that things are off to a shaky start. Despite some promising early reactions, the player count and Twitch viewership have plummeted, and the game has been flooded with negative reviews on Steam.

But Grenier insisted that the team is only focused on creating a game that “people love,” rather than the number of players.

“Whether it gets a thousand people or a hundred million people, it doesn’t matter. What matters most is that the game is loved by the people who played it,” he added.

After all of the experimenting, the game wound up being a 3v3 shooter made up of multiple phases: a fortifying phase, a looting phase, and a raiding phase (there’s now a permanent 5v5 mode too). It’s a far cry from Apex Legends, and they could only take this kind of risk by breaking away from Respawn Entertainment.

“One of the biggest problems with having the success of Apex is you’re kind of locked into the success of Apex,” said lead designer Mohammad Alavi. “We try to hopefully be creative and innovate in the shooter space.”

As an independent studio, CEO Dusty Welch believes they have more freedom to reach their own goals, and have Highguard “be beloved by as many people in the world as they can.”