Highguard is the latest free-to-play first-person shooter to hit the market, and if things keep going the way they are now, it’ll also be the latest free-to-play first-person shooter that was shut down after being unable to break through as a massive hit right at launch. After its trailer at The Game Awards failed to land with players, and the weeks of silence that followed did nothing to help, when it arrived, before players even made it through the tutorial, they were leaving negative reviews on Steam.
Even though it had over 97K concurrent players on Steam when it launched, those numbers quickly dwindled, and now, barely two weeks after it launched, developer Wildlight Entertainment confirmed that it had laid off several members of its staff, with those impacted confirming that “most” of the studio had been cut.
One of those impacted developers, Josh Sobel, a technical artist who worked on Highguard, took to X (formerly Twitter) to write an extended reflection on how the game’s launch went, what happened, and how he and several of his former colleagues are now out of a job and back looking for work in this volatile market.
After starting by discussing just how much everyone at the studio believed in the game, and how high its praise was from internal feedback, Sobel began digging into when things turned sour.
“But then the trailer came out, and it was all downhill from there,” Sobel begins. “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.“
Sobel went on to discuss how he and some of his colleagues were directly targeted after making celebratory posts about the game’s reveal and its subsequent launch, with a slew of hate and vitriol sent towards them.
“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.'”
On the topic of the game’s poor marketing in its lead-up to launch, Sobel didn’t directly comment because he felt it was not his place. He also made the point that we can never know if Highguard would have been received the same way, or more positively, if it hadn’t gone ahead with its Game Awards trailer, or even if it had submitted a different trailer to the show.
It should be noted that not long after user reviews on Steam began piling in, Wildlight’s chief executive officer, Dusty Welch, apologized for the game’s marketing up to that point and took responsibility for its “poor” trailer at The Game Awards.
“Look, I wish Highguard had been received better. I wish the feedback had been better. Part of that’s on us, right? We didn’t put our heads in the sand. We, as a team, saw the feedback. We’re gamers ourselves. We’re online ourselves reading the feedback,” Welch said in an interview. “I think, ultimately, we could have made a different trailer—a better trailer that wasn’t about entertaining, which is what we think The Game Awards was about. We could have made something that did a better job of highlighting the unique loop of the game. So that’s on us. We take that, but the team is resilient.“
Sobel continued, digging into how the public’s response to Highguard was to judge it before they had even touched it. “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.“
Sobel does add that Highguard’s current state is not fully the fault of the players who decided the game sucked before giving it a shot, or the subsection of the content creator economy that has been built off of negative content. But he does say that it played a role.
“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. All products are at the whims of the consumers, and the consumers put absurd amounts of effort into slandering Highguard. And it worked.”
Sobel concluded by remarking that if we keep seeing new multiplayer games get beaten out of the space by pre-conceived notions based on a bad trailer, we’ll stop seeing new multiplayer projects like Highguard even get their chance. Developers will stop taking the chance on a new upstart studio looking to try something new in the triple-A space, because it’s too much of a risk to put their livelihoods on the line. “Innovation is on life support.“
“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.“
Nothing is going to stop players from making snap decisions based on a trailer. If a game doesn’t resonate with them in an instant, many are quick to categorize their feelings for that game as negative and move on, sticking with what they already know. Especially when it comes to free-to-play games, where it’s understood that these games don’t just want your money for cosmetics, they want to consume as much of your gaming time as possible.
It’s up to developers to catch your eye and convince you that their game is worth investing that kind of time in. But it’s also fair to say that leaving a negative review before you’ve finished the tutorial should not be a weight placed on any game. You might have made up your mind about the game in seconds, but that doesn’t mean you can speak on its quality with any real authority. No one would pay someone any attention if they tried calling themselves a ‘critic’ or ‘reviewer’ after only playing five minutes of a game.
But even if Highguard didn’t get lambasted with negative reviews right off the jump, it’s difficult to say that it would have found success. For as big as free-to-play live service shooters are, there’s a great deal of fatigue players are feeling around these games, and ones trying to enter the genre are facing the brunt of that fatigue.
We’ll never be able to pin down one single reason Highguard’s launch has gone this way, but Sobel’s comments do provide insight into how developers see these launches play out from their end, and how hurtful it is to see people decide they’ve failed before they even started.
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