Highguard Dev Who Just Lost His Job Calls Out Toxic Online Reaction

Josh Sobel, who was previously a tech artist and rigger on live-service shooter Highguard, posted a prolonged, eye-opening weblog about his time engaged on the free-to-play FPS that has struggled since launching final month on consoles and PC.  Sobel additionally talks in regards to the response it obtained after its reveal and the harassment he suffered.

On February 12 Sobel, a former Wildlight Leisure developer who labored on Highguard for 2 and a half years, shared a post on Twitter containing ideas he says he has been eager to share “for some time.” Within the put up, titled “Reflecting On Delivery My First Recreation,” Sobel reveals that the day main as much as Highguard‘s massive reveal on the 2025 Recreation Awards was “amongst probably the most thrilling” in his life. “The long run appeared vibrant,” added the developer. Nonetheless, shortly after its reveal in December, it became clear that wasn’t the case.

“Then the trailer got here out, and it was all downhill from there,” mentioned Sobel.

“The hate began instantly. Along with dogpiling on the trailer, I personally got here underneath fireplace as a result of my naïveté on Twitter, which just about all of my now-former coworkers had discovered to keep away from throughout their earlier recreation launches. After setting my Twitter account to non-public to guard my sanity, many content material creators made movies and posts about me and my cowardice, amassing tens of millions of views and inadvertently sending a whole lot of indignant players into my replies. They laughed at me for being pleased with the sport, informed me to get out the McDonald’s purposes, and mocked me for itemizing having autism in my bio, which they appeared to suppose was proof the sport can be ‘woke trash.’ All of this was very emotionally taxing.”

Sobel admits that there’s loads of “constructive criticism” about how the sport was marketed, however mentioned he didn’t really feel prefer it was his place to touch upon that and said that there isn’t a method to know if the launch would have been higher or worse with out the Recreation Awards reveal. Regardless, after the trailer landed, Sobel says the sport “became a joke from minute one” and blames “false assumptions” about how a lot the trailer’s spot value the studio. It was later revealed that Wildlight didn’t pay something; Recreation Awards founder Geoff Keighley simply appreciated the sport sufficient to incorporate it.

“Inside minutes, it was determined: this recreation was useless on arrival, and creators now had free ragebait content material for a month. Each considered one of our movies on social media obtained downvoted to hell. Feedback sections have been flooded with copy/paste meme phrases corresponding to ‘Concord 2‘ and ‘Titanfall 3 died for this.’ At launch, we acquired over 14k evaluation bombs from customers with lower than an hour of playtime. Many didn’t even end the required tutorial.”

The previous Highguard dev didn’t solely blame players for the shooter’s failure, however did recommend that gamers have a “lot” of power over what games succeed and fail.

“I’m not saying our failure is only the fault of gamer tradition and that the sport would have thrived with out the unfavorable discourse, but it surely completely performed a job. All merchandise are on the whims of the customers, and the customers put absurd quantities of effort into slandering Highguard. And it labored.” Wildlight recently announced massive layoffs.