Josh Sobel, former technical artist and editor on a live-action shooter High Guardpublished a lengthy and revealing blog about his time working on the free-to-play FPS that has struggled since its launch last month on consoles and PC. Sobel also talks about the response he received after his revelation and the harassment he experienced.
On February 12, Sobel, a former Wildlight Entertainment developer who worked on High Guard for two and a half years, shared a post on Twitter containing thoughts he says he’s wanted to share “for a while.” In the article titled “Reflecting on Shipping My First Game,” Sobel reveals that the day before High Guard’s big reveal at The Game Awards 2025 was “among the most exciting” of his life. “The future looked bright,” the developer added. However, shortly after it was revealed in December, it became clear that this was not the case.
“Then the trailer came out, and everything went downhill from there,” Sobel said.
“The hate started immediately. In addition to lashing out at the trailer, I was personally criticized for my naivety on Twitter, something almost all of my former colleagues had learned to avoid during their previous game launches. After making my Twitter account private to protect my sanity, many content creators made videos and posts about me and my cowardice, amassing millions of views and inadvertently sending hundreds of angry gamers into my replies. They were mocked of me for being proud of the game, told me to pull out the McDonald’s apps, and made fun of me for mentioning autism in my bio, which they seemed to think was proof that the game would be “woke trash.” It was all very emotionally taxing.
Sobel admits there is a lot of “constructive criticism” about how the game was marketed, but said he didn’t think it was his place to comment on that and said there was no way of knowing whether the launch would have been better or worse without the Game Awards reveal. Regardless, after the trailer aired, Sobel said the game “turned into a joke from minute one” and blamed “false assumptions” about how much the trailer spot cost the studio. It was later revealed that Wildlight had paid nothing; Game Awards founder Geoff Keighley liked the game enough to include it.
“Within minutes it was decided: this game was dead on arrival, and the creators now had free ragebait content for a month. Every single one of our videos on social media was downvoted. Comment sections were flooded with copy/pasted meme phrases like “Concord 2» and “Titanfall 3 died for this”. At launch, we received over 14,000 review bombs from users with less than an hour of play. Many haven’t even completed the required tutorial.
The old High Guard The developers didn’t entirely blame players for the shooter’s failure, but suggested that players have “a lot” of power over which games succeed and fail.
“I’m not saying that our failure was solely due to gamer culture and that the game would have thrived without the negative discourse, but it absolutely played a role. All products are at the whim of consumers, and consumers go to absurd lengths to slander High Guard. And it worked. Wildlight recently announced massive layoffs.
“Many of Wildlight’s former developers will now be forced to reintegrate into today’s corporate industry, which many gamers accused Wildlight of being a part of. Now, every time someone thinks about leaving the golden handcuffs behind in favor of creating a new multiplayer game independently, they will say, “But remember, gamers didn’t even give Wildlight a chance.” Soon, if this pattern continues, there will only be left companies, at least in the multiplayer space Innovation is on life support.
Sobel concluded his message by wishing the remaining developers studio good luck for High Guardand saying he believes it can still succeed. He also made it clear that he didn’t think the match deserved what he got.
“Even if High Guard “We had a rough launch, our independent, self-published, developer-led studio full of passionate people just trying to make a fun game, with no AI and no corporate oversight, deserved better than this,” Sobel said. “We deserve the bare minimum of not seeing our downfall joyfully manifested.”
