As Highguard studio Wildlight faces mass layoffs, dev reacts, decries "gamer culture" and says "innovation is on life support" — "We were turned into a joke from minute one"

The final game announcement that capped off 2025's The Game Awards show was Highguard, the new "PvP raid shooter" from Wildlight Entertainment, a fledgling independent studio led by former Apex Legends and Titanfall developers from Respawn Entertainment. It came out late last month across Xbox, Windows PC, and PS5 on January 26, but just over two weeks later, the future for both the FPS and the team that made it looks bleak.

This week, several (now former) Wildlight devs revealed there have been mass layoffs at the studio, and while the game remains playable, it seems clear it's on life support, and will be maintained by a skeleton crew. One such developer, artist Josh Sobel, has taken to social media to lament Highguard's failure and reflect on how it was perceived by gamers.

Sobel says that everyone at Wildlight was very optimistic about the project after working on it for two-and-a-half years, and that feedback "even from unbiased sources" was positive, with negative critique being "constructive, and actionable." But then 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," he wrote.

"The hate started immediately," he continued, before detailing how gamers harassed him personally and relentlessly on Twitter (X), and then proceeded to do so elsewhere after content creators mocked him for setting his account to Private status. "All of this was very emotionally taxing."

"We were turned into a joke from minute one, largely due to false assumptions about a million-dollar ad placement," Sobel notes, referring to how many believed the placement of Highguard's trailer at The Game Awards was due to payment; showrunner Geoff Keighley reportedly just liked the game.

"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,'" he lamented. "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 goes on to acknowledge that there's been "constructive criticism" about Highguard and that what's happened isn't "purely the fault of gamer culture," but asserts that "it absolutely played a role" in the game's downfall. "All products are at the whims of the consumers, and the consumers put absurd amounts of effort into slandering Highguard. And it worked," he argues.

Now, Sobel says, many of Wildlight's former staff will be "forced to assimilate back into the actual corporate industry" they tried to avoid by going independent, and that Highguard will be used as an argument against "leaving the golden handcuffs behind in favor of making a new multiplayer game the indie way" in the future. "Soon, if this pattern continues, all that will be left are corporations, at least in the multiplayer space. Innovation is on life support."

"Even if Highguard had a rocky launch, our independent, self-published, dev-led studio full of passionate people just trying to make a fun game, with zero AI, and zero corporate oversight…deserved better than this," he stated. "We deserved the bare minimum of not having our downfall be gleefully manifested."

Ultimately, I do agree with Sobel that the oft-vitriolic nature of online gaming communities played a significant role in setting Highguard up for failure. In fact, given that many were cheering for a "Concord 2.0" situation, I'd argue it's undeniable. At the same time, however, I also believe it's true that Highguard simply didn't deliver a polished, refined FPS experience, and has an incredibly safe, bland, and — ironically — corporate vibe that didn't rouse player interest.

In the end, though, Wildlight's developers did deserve better than to be laid off weeks after their debut title because it flopped. This is a harrowing reminder of how brutal and broken this industry is, and I sincerely hope that everyone affected by the studio's cuts lands on their feet.

What do you think of Highguard, and how gamers were declaring it dead on arrival since the moment it was announced? Have you played it yourself? Let me know in the comments.

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