Are hostile gamers to blame for Highguard's failure?

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A dev reveals the view from the inside of a failed a game launch.

Highguard is the latest live-service shooter to suffer a spectacular failure on launch., and it's a failure that some seem to have taken delight in witnessing. For those involved in the game, however, the reception has been heartbreaking.

After just two weeks, Wildlight Entertainment said it was laying off the majority of its development team because Highguard had failed to maintain a big enough audience to justify working on it at scale. Instead it will work with "a core group of developers to continue innovating on and supporting the game".

Highguard | Official Launch Showcase - YouTube Highguard | Official Launch Showcase - YouTube
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Josh Sobel, a tech artist and rigger who worked on Highguard, took to social media to share his thoughts, and he thinks the hostility of the reaction from some gamers, particularly content creators, played a large role in the game's downfall. “Consumers put absurd amounts of effort into slandering Highguard,” he argues.

In a post, titled “Reflecting On Shipping My First Game,” he shares the rollercoaster of emotions that accompanied preparation for the game's launch. The day before Highguard‘s reveal at the 2025 Game Awards was “amongst the most exciting” of Josh's life... “then the trailer came out, and it was all downhill from there”.

While Josh accepts that there was “constructive criticism” about the game's marketing, he thinks some of the reactions to the trailer were exaggeratedly hostile, including comments against him personally.

“The hate started immediately. In addition to dogpiling on the trailer, I personally came under fire due to my naïveté on Twitter, which almost all of my now-former coworkers had learned to avoid during their previous game launches.,” he writes.

“After setting my Twitter account to private to protect my sanity, many content creators made videos and posts about me and my cowardice, amassing millions of views and inadvertently sending hundreds of angry gamers into my replies.

“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.’ All of this was very emotionally taxing.”

Josh complains about “false assumptions” over how much the trailer’s Game Awards spot cost (it emerged that Game Awards founder Geoff Keighley gave the game a spot for free because he liked it). He also critcised the speed at which people rushed to judge the game, often without playing it.

“Within minutes, it was decided: this game was dead on arrival, and creators now had free ragebait content for a month,” Josh writes. “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.”

While he accepted that gamer culture can't be blamed entirely, he's convinced that it played a role. He also fears that the phenomenon could have a dampening effect on creativity in the games industry as it will make artists think twice about joining indie projects.

“Many of Wildlight’s former devs will now be forced to assimilate back into the actual corporate industry many gamers accused Wildlight of being a part of,” he wrote. “Now, every time someone thinks about leaving the golden handcuffs 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.’

“Soon, if this pattern continues, all that will be left are corporations, at least in the multiplayer space. Innovation is on life support.”

Josh's comments have generated more debate. While some agree that some gamers and reviewers can be toxic and use negativity to boost their own exposure, others point out that the game had plenty of issues, from design to marketing.

What do you think? Are unfounded hostility and uninformed social media pile-ons killing games that deserved a chance, or do developers need to remember that they work for a market?

Joe Foley
Joe Foley
Freelance journalist and editor

Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.

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