Highguard dev criticises ‘gamer culture’ for game’s failure – and he has a point

An ex-Highguard developer has criticised the negativity surrounding the game’s reveal and launch, blaming its failure on ‘gamer culture’.

Within the space of a couple of months, Highguard has had one of the most turbulent runs, from initial announcement to launch, in recent memory.

The free-to-play shooter, from many of the developers behind Apex Legends and Titanfall, was revealed during The Game Awards in December in the climactic final slot. Rather than being beneficial, its placement in the show upset many viewers, who were expecting something more established to close the event.

This negative perception, including comparisons to Concord, hung over Highguard until it released on January 26 – and arguably afterwards too. Despite a strong start, with over 97,000 concurrent players on Steam at launch, that number quickly dropped. At time of writing (via SteamDB), its 24-hour player peak hit just 2,618 players.

This sudden drop in interest led developer Wildlight Entertainment to lay off the majority of its staff, leaving ‘a core group of developers’ to continue to support the title. While the game isn’t shutting down, with a full year of DLC planned, its future isn’t looking bright.

One employee who was laid off – technical artist Josh Sobel – has posted a lengthy statement on X about Highguard’s reveal and launch from the inside, claiming it was ‘all downhill’ from the first trailer.

Sobel says the team at Wildlight didn’t expect such a negative reaction to its reveal, after initial internal feedback, including ‘unbiased sources’, was ‘quite positive’.

‘People who played the game, including us, had a blast,’ he wrote. ‘And since we were an independent, self-published studio built with royalties in mind, many of us were hoping this could finally be the thing that broke the millenial financial curse.’

He added: ‘But then the trailer came out, and it was all downhill from there. Content creators love to point out the bias in folks who give positive previews after being flown out for an event, but ignore the fact that when their negative-leaning content get 10x the engagement of the positive, they’ve got just as much incentive to lean into a disingenuous direction, whether consciously or not.’

Sobel says the ‘hate started immediately’, including ‘dogpiling’ on the trailer and personal attacks in the form of videos by content creators about his ‘cowardice’, after he set his Twitter account to private.

‘They laughed at me for being proud of the game, told me to get out the McDonald’s applications, and mocked me for listing having autism in my bio, which they seemed to think was evidence the game would be ‘woke trash’.’ he added. ‘All of this was very emotionally taxing.’

‘There is much constructive criticism that can be and has been said about Highguard’s trailer, marketing, and launch, but I don’t think it’s my place to commentate on that. I also don’t think there’s any way to know whether the launch would have fared better or worse without the massive spotlight that was thrown onto us in response to The Game Awards’ trailer placement. But we never got that chance.

‘We were turned into a joke from minute one, largely due to false assumptions about a million dollar ad placement, which even prominent journalists soon began to state as fact. Within minutes, it was decided: this game was dead on arrival, and creators now had free ragebait content for a month.

Every one of our videos on social media got downvoted to hell. Comments sections were flooded with copy/paste meme phrases such as ‘Concord 2’ and ‘Titanfall 3 died for this.’ At launch, we received over 14K review bombs from users with less than an hour of playtime. Many didn’t even finish the required tutorial.’

He goes onto state that in online discussions about games like Highguard, 2XKO, and Concord, people believe developers ‘like to blame gamers for their failures’, but Sobel describes that as ‘silly’, since gamers have ‘a lot of’ power to determine a game’s future.

‘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,’ Sobel added. ‘All products are at the whims of the consumers, and the consumers put absurd amounts of effort into slandering Highguard. And it worked.’

It’s a tricky issue as while there are a lot of reasonable points here – especially how the online world rewards negativity above all else – Highguard had some notable shortcomings as a live service title. The most glaring, and we think the main reason why it got so much negativity in the first place, was its generic presentation.

The team at Wildlight has been responsive in making changes to Highguard, like introducing a permanent 5v5 mode, but it’s hard to tell if it will lead to the kind of resurgence it needs to survive. When a game’s financial sustainability comes from cosmetics, you need enticing aesthetics, rewards, and characters to back it up.

To round off his post, Sobel says he still believes in Highguard and hopes it ‘can stay the course’, adding: ‘Even though this adventure has come to an abrupt and emotionally challenging close, I don’t regret one second of it.’

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