In the wake of layoffs at Wildlight Entertainment just over two weeks after the launch of Highguard, former lead technical artist Josh Sobel has shared some raw thoughts on the matter in a lengthy post on X, saying it was “all downhill” after the game’s reveal at the 2025 Game Awards.
Internal feedback on Highguard prior to its reveal “was quite positive,” Sobel wrote: There was, apparently, a widespread expectation that the game was a sure-fire hit.
And as Highguard criticism goes, that was on the mild side of things. Sobel said “the hate started immediately,” aimed at Highguard and also at him personally: After locking his X account the day after Highguard was revealed, he said that “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’.”
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The bitterness in Sobel’s message is impossible to overlook, and fair enough: His wounds are still fresh, and I don’t think there’s any question that many of the reactions to the Highguard reveal were hyperbolic beyond all reason. But his emphasis on the universally positive pre-release feedback, reflected in statements from observers like ‘There’s no way this will flop’ and ‘This has mainstream hit written all over it,’ suggests to me that more dispassionate and critical eyes throughout the development process were sorely needed: Live service games can and do flop, more often than not.
It’s easy (and maybe even tempting) to say the haters won out, but more thoughtful critics, including our own Morgan Park, found Highguard to be a perfectly fine but far from remarkable experience: As Morgan wrote in his 65% review, “It takes the chaotic spirit of Rust or Minecraft Bed Wars and sands it down until it’s frictionless and bland.”
I don’t like seeing games fail (and to be clear, Highguard is still around—Wildlight said a “core group of developers [will] continue innovating on and supporting the game”) but the reality is that Highguard pulled in hundreds of thousands of players and Twitch viewers when it launched in January—they just chose not to stick around.
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