In the wake of Highguard developer laying off staff and announcing that only a “core” group of developers will continue work on the game, one former developer has reflected on the entire situation surrounding the game, from its much-discussed reveal at The Game Awards to where it stands today.
Josh Sobel was a lead tech artist at Wildlight until he was laid off on February 11, and the developer began their message by discussing the time right before Highguard was revealed to the world at The Game Awards on December 11. This was an exciting time in Sobel’s life. They were amped for the world to see what Wildlight had been working on in secret for the previous 2.5 years.
“The future seemed bright. Everyone I knew who had any connection to the team or project had the same sentiments: ‘This is lightning in a bottle.’ ‘I trust this team wholeheartedly.’ ‘If there’s one project nobody in the industry is worried will fail, it’s yours.’ ‘This has mainstream hit written all over it.’ ‘There’s no way this will flop.’ ‘I could play this game all day,'” Sobel said.
Sobel said pre-reveal feedback was “quite positive,” even from people with no stake in the game. There was negative feedback, too, and it was presented in a “constructive, and often actionable” way, the developer said.
“People who played the game, including us, had a blast. And since we were an independent, self-published studio built with royalties in mind, many of us were hoping this could finally be the thing that broke the millennial financial curse,” Sobel said.
The Game Awards host and organizer Geoff Keighley was among those who were psyched about Highguard based on its early tests. Keighley loved the game so much that he gave Wildlight the option to have the final reveal of the night at The Game Awards, and he didn’t charge them for it when other companies had to pay as much as $1 million.
“But then the trailer came out, and it was all downhill from there,” Sobel said.
After The Game Awards, Wildlight went mostly silent and didn’t resurface until around the time that Highguard launched on January 26. It later came to light that Wildlight intended for Highguard to be a shadowdrop like Apex Legends, which some of Highguard’s team worked on.
The commentary about Highguard online online swiftly turned negative. “The hate started immediately,” Sobel wrote, adding that personal attacks were directed at them as well.
“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 wrote.
Sobel turned their X account private, but that didn’t stop the criticisms, as people made videos and their own posts about Sobel and their “cowardice.”
“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,'” Sobel wrote. “All of this was very emotionally taxing.”
Some have questioned if it was the right call for Wildlight to announced and promote Highguard the way it did, and Sobel said it’s not his place to speak about that. Sobel also pointed out that it’s impossible to know how things could have gone differently if Wildlight tried a different approach.
“I also don’t think there’s any way to know whether the launch would have fared better or worse without the massive spotlight that was thrown onto us in response to The Game Awards’ trailer placement,” Sobel wrote. “But we never got that 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.”
Sobel went on to say that it’s true that gamers en masse have the power to help decide the fate of a given game, and he believes the campaign against Highguard–as they see 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,” Sobel wrote. “All products are at the whims of the consumers, and the consumers put absurd amounts of effort into slandering Highguard. And it worked.”
The implications of what happened with Highguard could be serious, Sobel said.
“Many of Wildlight’s former devs will now be forced to assimilate back into the actual corporate industry many gamers accused Wildlight of being a part of. Now, every time someone thinks about leaving the golden handcuffs behind in favor of making a new multiplayer game the indie way, they’ll say, ‘But remember how gamers didn’t even give Wildlight a chance.’ Soon, if this pattern continues, all that will be left are corporations, at least in the multiplayer space,” he said. “Innovation is on life support.”
Sobel said Highguard “deserved better than this,” and lamented the fact that a game from an independent studio that was self-published and featured no AI did not find an audience.
“We deserved the bare minimum of not having our downfall be gleefully manifested. I wish the best of luck to the few who remain at Wildlight, and hope Highguard can stay the course,” Sobel said.
Wildlight previously laid out Year 1 DLC roadmap and had promised to deliver new updates at a faster pace than Apex Legends. It remains to be seen if plans have changed since the layoffs, and GameSpot has followed up with Wildlight in an attempt to get more details.
