Last week, recently laid off Highguard developer Josh Sobel opened up about what it felt like revealing the game at the Game Awards 2025 and then watching some of the loudest parts of the internet dunk on the game up through its January launch. One of the things he called out was people “gleefully” trying to manifest the online hero shooter’s immediate downfall. The response to his earnest inside look at having worked on the game was immediately greeted by such a harsh and toxic backlash he’s now deleted the post as well as the rest of his account.
“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 wrote on X on February 12, just days after Wildlight Entertainment announced sweeping staff cuts.
The post kicked off a fresh firestorm from a diffuse mob of angry online gamers and social media clout chasers who used the message to attack Highguard‘s developers as out of touch. They were accused of trying to deflect blame for making a game that just didn’t connect with many players. As happened with Concord before it, some people started looking for any post by anybody who worked on Highguard that they could find to start dunking on the person and the game.
Update:
Josh Sobel has now deleted his X account entirely, just days after publishing an article blaming gamers for Highguard’s failure.
Looks like the deflection didn’t land the way he expected. https://t.co/IQCneqclUm pic.twitter.com/faxHwewyK4
— MasteroftheTDS (@MasteroftheTDS) February 15, 2026
Look, a few different things can be true here at same time. According to the data firm Ampere Analysis, an estimated 1.54 million people played Highguard last month. That’s around what Palworld hit when it launched. In other words, tons of people tried Highguard and then didn’t come back. That already makes it completely different from the apathy bomb Concord launched into. It also suggests that despite despite all the people trying to “manifest” failure on social media, Highguard had its shot to find a big audience and just couldn’t capitalize.
But it’s also true that regardless of whether it had any impact on initial downloads and playtime, anyone who paid attention to Highguard at all during it’s launch would have though the developers had advertised the game by dropping kittens off rooftops. Thousands of negative reviews by people who barely played a single match did get posted to Steam and plenty of people online were jonesing for a “Concord 2.0” flameout.
Even if you think Sobel’s argument that an artificial gravity well of bad-faith negativity hurt the game is wrong, it still sucks that it happened. It’s also, frankly, bizarre. Another overlooked point made by the developer who, remember, had just lost his job working on his dream game, was that Wildlight Entertainment was not some mega publisher chasing market fits on a spreadsheet. Highguard was not a live service game designed in a lab by Excel.
Not every game can succeed. Even great ones fail. But you can’t champion risk-taking in game development while also engaging in witch hunts against people just for placing bets you don’t like.
