When Wildlight Entertainment laid off most of its staff in February, technical artist Josh Sobel took to social media to air grievances that were bottled up through months of development turmoil. That post, which suggested online hostility played a role in the game's collapse, attracted precisely the backlash it described. Sobel deleted his X account within days.
Now, as Highguard enters its final hours before permanent shutdown on March 12, Sobel has reactivated his account to offer something more measured: a reckoning with his own response to the chaos.
Sobel called his original post "a mistake," explaining that "I was stressed, devastated, angry, and running on 2hrs sleep. It was not wise to take my pain to the Internet" in that state. Yet he has not entirely walked back what he said then. He maintains that "very dark corners" of the online discourse could have "accelerated the timeline of our failure," though he now qualifies this by saying it "wasn't the primary cause."
The context matters. Sobel had spent 2.5 years working on Highguard and was in the audience when it was revealed at The Game Awards 2025, with "the future seemed bright." What followed was rapid and vicious. Within minutes of the trailer, "it was decided: this game was dead on arrival." The Highguard team's social media videos were "downvoted to hell," and at launch the game received over 14,000 review bombs from users with less than an hour of playtime.
The personal toll was considerable. After locking his X account the day the trailer aired, Sobel said that "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." He was mocked for being proud of the game and for listing autism in his bio, which some treated as evidence the game would be "woke trash."
Sobel now acknowledges that "there were a lot of elements involved" in the game's failure, and "there's no way to know how it would have gone under different circumstances." The game saw around 1.5 million people try it in its opening days, with a peak of about 100,000 concurrent players, yet those initial players did not return.
Other team members have offered competing explanations for the collapse. Former senior designer Alex Graner suggested the game "leaned too far into the competitive scene," with the 3v3 mode feeling too "sweaty" and unwelcoming to casual players. Studio head Chad Grenier later revealed that Highguard had been released unfinished because the studio ran out of money, saying: "When you're out of time and money, you have to release a game with the runway you have available, and hope players stick with you post-launch."
It emerged that Tencent, the Chinese technology giant reportedly backing the game, pulled its funding just weeks after launch, presumably when it became clear the game wasn't meeting targets.
The hostility was real and measurable enough that there is "little room for doubt that the intense levels of vitriol targeted at the project colored the experience, and at the very least didn't help." Yet it was one factor among many. Sobel's original instinct to call out the abuse was defensible; his current, more cautious stance appears to reflect both exhaustion and a sober view of how complex the failure actually was. The game closes its servers in two days, and with it closes a chapter in an increasingly crowded graveyard of failed live service shooters.
For Sobel, reactivating his account was a choice to remain present rather than flee. He set his replies to followers only, a small act of self-protection as he attempts to reclaim narrative control over a story that spun out of his hands entirely.