Laid-off Highguard developer cuts loose on the reaction to the infamous Game Awards reveal trailer: 'We were turned into a joke from minute one'
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.
"The day leading to The Game Awards 2025 was amongst the most exciting of my life. After 2.5 yrs of passionately working on Highguard, we were ready to reveal it to the world. The future seemed bright."
"But then the trailer came out, and it was all downhill from there."
The trailer arrived at the very end of the 2025 Game Awards in the coveted "just one more thing" spot, but it didn't land with quite the impact that Sobel or Wildlight expected. I said in my own immediate reaction to the trailer that Highguard's characters "look like they have all the personality of a space heater," and that's maybe a little harsh but I stand by it. (Full disclosure: I've never actually played Highguard because my rig won't run it, so I'm literally just calling it as I see it.)
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'."
There's no way to know how Highguard would have fared if the pressure of that Game Awards trailer hadn't been placed upon it, Sobel wrote, but it doesn't really matter because "we never got the 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."
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.