Laid off Highguard developer criticises online ‘dogpiling’, ‘ragebait content’ and personal attacks

A Highguard developer who was among those recently laid off has criticised the way the game and its creators were treated online following its reveal.

Highguard, the debut game from Wildlight Entertainment, was announced with great fanfare at the close of December’s The Game Awards. Developed by veterans of the hero shooter genre, the game combines FPS mechanics with rideable mounts and ‘raid’ mechanics, with teams tasked with breaching each other’s bases.

After weeks of silence, it then launched as a free-to-play title for PC and consoles on January 26 and appeared to enjoy a strong start with nearly 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, but received mixed reviews after launch and saw its concurrent players drop severely – at the time of writing, the game hasn’t passed 5,000 concurrent Steam players all week.

After a designer claimed that “most” of the team had been laid off, Wildlight subsequently confirmed that it had laid off “a number of team members while keeping a core group of developers to continue innovating on and supporting the game”.

One of these laid off team members, tech artist Josh Sobel, has now taken to X to criticise the way the game was treated by players after its initial reveal, suggesting it played a large part in the game’s current situation.

Sobel claimed that all the feedback the team had received prior to the game’s reveal, “even from unbiased sources”, was widely positive, with alleged comments such as “there’s no way this will flop”, “this has mainstream hit written all over it” and “if there’s one project nobody in the industry is worried will fail, it’s yours”.

After the reveal at The Game Awards, however, Sobel says it “was all downhill from there”, claiming that YouTubers posting ‘ragebait’ content played a large role in driving negativity.

“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,” he wrote.

Sobel claims he received personal attacks due to his “naïveté on Twitter”, saying: “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.”

Stating that it’s “not my place” to comment on whether the game would have been better received had its initial unveiling not been a “massive spotlight” as the final reveal at The Game Awards, Sobel says the game was nevertheless declared “dead on arrival” within minutes of the announcement.

“Every one of our videos on social media got downvoted to hell,” he said. “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.”

He added: “In discussions online about Highguard, Concord, 2XKO, and such, it is often pointed out by gamers that devs like to blame gamers for their failures, and that that’s silly, as if gamers have no power. But they do. A lot of it.

“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’s post on X has received a variety of replies, ranging from some people backing him and the team, to others suggesting that other factors may have also played a role in the game’s underwhelming launch, its largely hyped reveal aside.

Some replies have suggested that releasing without a beta or any other way of receiving feedback from players may have resulted in a weaker game, and that the team may have put too much trust in the largely positive feedback received from peers early on.

Others have suggested that the fact the game launched with nearly 100,000 concurrent players on Steam alone means that even if some of these people were ‘bad actors’ looking to post negative reviews, there was still a chance to keep a larger number of them on board if the game had been engaging enough.

Wildlight had detailed a year of post-launch content for Highguard and launched the game’s second ‘episode’, with new maps and items, just last week.

Speaking to Polygon ahead of launch, Wildlight’s studio head Chad Grenier claimed that he wasn’t concerned about reaching large player numbers, saying: “Whether it gets a thousand people or a hundred million people, it doesn’t matter. What matters most is that the game is loved by the people who played it.”