Highguard developer blames flop on gamer ‘slander’ and negative discourse

Josh Sobel, a technical artist and rigger who was recently affected by the layoffs at Wildlight Entertainment, the studio behind Highguard, has taken to X to reflect on the game’s launch.

“The day leading to The Game Awards 2025 was amongst the most exciting of my life,” he admitted. “After 2.5 years of passionately working on Highguard, we were ready to reveal it to the world. The future seemed bright.”

After explaining how, ahead of the big reveal, nobody had any qualms or concerns about the game from their internal feedback, once the public had seen the game, “it was all downhill from there.” Sobel revealed that alongside “gamers dogpiling on the trailer,” he received a lot of hate on X, not to mention content creators making “videos and posts about my cowardice” for setting his profile to private to protect himself.

The lengthy post goes on to condemn the people who “turned [Highguard] into a joke from minute one… Within minutes, it was decided: this game was dead on arrival…At launch, we received over 14,000 review bombs from users with less than an hour of playtime. Many didn’t even finish the required tutorial.

“In discussions online about Highguard, Concord, 2XKO, and such, it is often pointed out by gamers that devs like to blame gamers for their failures, and that that’s silly. As if gamers have no power. But they do. A lot of it. I’m not saying our failure is purely the fault of gamer culture and that the game would have thrived without the negative discourse, but it absolutely played a role. All products are at the whims of the consumers, and the consumers put absurd amounts of effort into slandering Highguard. And it worked.”

His post concludes by claiming “innovation is on life support” because “every time someone thinks about leaving the golden handcuffs (read: AAA studios) behind in favor of making a new multiplayer game the indie way, they’ll say ’but remember how gamers didn’t even give Wildlight a chance.’

“Our independent, self-published, dev-led studio… deserved better than this. We deserved the bare minimum of not having our downfall be gleefully manifested.”

Highguard was released at the end of January, and while launch day saw almost 100,000 concurrent players on Steam alone, the current average count is no more than 3% of that number, and it is going down by the day. Perhaps it’s time to discuss why the free-to-play model isn’t working anymore, and Highguard is a prime example of that.

In our Highguard review, we explain how it feels like “wasted potential,” and that while the foundation is solid, it needed more time in the oven to iron out the kinks before it was ready for public consumption.