With Highguard developer Wildlight Entertainment currently going through troubled times in light of recent lay-offs, former technical artist and rigger on the project, Josh Sobel, has published a lengthy post on Twitter about his experience with working on the PvP raid shooter. He noted that, while internal feedback had been largely positive, things changed quite quickly once the trailer was released, closing out The Game Awards 2025.
“The internal pre-reveal feedback, even from unbiased sources, was quite positive, and where it was negative, it was constructive, and often actionable. 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 millennial financial curse.”
“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 gets 10x the engagement of the positive, they’ve got just as much incentive to lean into a disingenuous direction, whether consciously or not.”
Among other things, Sobel called out the massive amounts of negativity faced by not only Wildlight Entertainment, but also individual developers, including himself. While he did note that there was some constructive criticism buried underneath, a large part of the online discourse largely revolved around personal attacks towards the developers.
“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,” he wrote, going on to note that, thanks to this backlash, Highguard and Wildlight Entertainment “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.”
While Sobel doesn’t place the blame squarely on “gamer culture” and online negativity, he noted that these factors “absolutely played a role,” since consumers will ultimately decide whether or not a project is successful. He believes that this will also have an added effect of dissuading more game developers from pursuing independent creation rather than working for a major company.
“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. 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,” he wrote, referring to the recent lay-offs.
“Even if Highguard had a rocky launch, our independent, self-published, dev-led studio full of passionate people just trying to make a fun game, with zero AI, and zero corporate oversight…deserved better than this. We deserved the bare minimum of not having our downfall be gleefully manifested.”
While a majority of the development team behind Highguard has been laid off, Wildlight Entertainment has noted that work on the PvP raid shooter will continue thanks to smaller team still remaining. The title recently got its Episode 2 update bringing in a host of new content.
Highguard is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. For a look at our thoughts of its state at launch, check out our review.
