Josh Sobel, the former Lead Tech Artist at Wildlight Entertainment, the developer of Highguard, blamed gamers for the game’s failure.
Sobel accusation comes in the wake of the Wildlight Entertainment laying off a significant portion of its employees.
The company posted to X, “Today we made an incredibly difficult decision to part ways with a number of our team members while keeping a core group of developers to continue innovating on and supporting the game.”
”We're proud of the team, talent, and the product we've created together,” it continued. “We're also grateful for players who gave the game a shot, and those who continue to be a part of our community.”
That announcement came after the game’s player base declined over 96% since it was released back in January. It hit a peak player count of 97,249 when it was released and his since declined to a 24-hour peak of just 2,922.
Sobel blamed gamers in an article post to X. He wrote, “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.”
“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,” he added. “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.”
He then made it abundantly clear he was indeed blaming gamers, “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.”
In contrast to Sobel’s claim it appears that a significant number of gamers did indeed give the game a chance, one need only look at the nearly 100,000 concurrent players that were playing it at launch. However, they were clearly not satisfied with it and quickly abandoned it.
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Oh boy, like Somalis, they never lear.
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