Highguard has been out for about 24 hours now, and surprisingly, one of the people getting flak for the perceived slight of its existence is Game Awards host Geoff Keighley. Wildlight Entertainment had originally planned to shadow-drop its Apex Legends spiritual successor before Keighley approached them about featuring it in December’s award show with a pimp spot, and now that the game is out and people are having…passionate reactions to it, the host has been getting an odd amount of hate for it.
Thoughts on Highguard so far?
— Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley) January 26, 2026
You can check the replies to his tweets for some unhinged responses, but I’ve also seen some pretty wild accusations that Keighley has some kind of financial stake in Highguard’s success. He even responded to that line of thinking on X, saying “lol absolutely not.”
Part of this probably stems in part from Keighley’s sometimes teary-eyed enthusiasm about some games he’s shown at the Game Awards having become a meme in and of itself, and Highguard’s show-closing placement in last year’s awards show has been under some weird scrutiny since December. The host has also been telling the Highguard hate brigade they would regret their words and deeds in the lead-up to launch. Now that the game is out and many people don’t like it, Keighley’s earlier support of the game is seeing him lumped into the crowd that the haters are dogpiling on, now with a mix of “I told you so.”
I played a bit of Highguard last night before swapping back to the same live-service game I’ve been playing for seven years, and yeah, it’s got some problems, but I’m still kind of baffled at the level of vitriol being directed at it. We’ll see how the game ultimately does, as it seems like Wildlight has some pretty extensive post-launch plans coming down the pipeline.
