We're not even halfway into 2026, and Highguard, the debut free-to-play game from Wildlight Entertainment, will officially go offline tomorrow. While this game has received plenty of coverage over the past few months, the thing that it was never able to find was a target audience, something that even paid titles desperately need to survive. By comparison, Bungie's contentious new extraction shooter Marathon seems to be resonating with a core, albeit limited, player base.
In the recent days, we have seen admissions from the devs that the game was pushed out to the public before it was ready, due to the fact that the studio was running out of funds. This followed the news that Tencent, the Chinese tech conglomerate, was the single largest backer of the studio, and after seeing the lack of interest in Highguard among potential customers, pulled their support from Wildlight entirely.
On March 10th, disgraced ex-Wildlight dev Josh Sobel made his return to X, after previously posting and then deleting a now infamous essay in which he displayed the toxic positivity at Wildlight and blamed gamers and reactionary YouTubers for the failure of his game. He has now come out and posted a revised version of his previous diatribe.
Josh wrote, "Since I reactivated my account, I’ll address the elephant in the room. My now-deleted tweet following the Highguard layoff news a month ago was a mistake. I was stressed, devastated, angry, and running on 2hrs sleep. It was not wise to take my pain to the Internet in that volatile state."
"I stand by the intent behind much of what I said, but I phrased it poorly, and some of my anger was misdirected. I believe the online discourse around Highguard had some very dark corners that may have accelerated the timeline of our failure beyond the natural outcome of reasonable critique, but it wasn’t the primary cause, and I don’t personally believe the ultimate outcome would have been thoroughly different without it. There were a lot of elements involved, and there’s no way to know how it would have gone under different circumstances."
"I restored my Twitter account a few days before the 1-month no-recover date, because I value the connections I’ve made on here. I’ll be keeping replies locked to accounts I follow for the time being because I maintain the right to protect my mental health. It’s time for my next chapter. Thanks for listening."
This will likely fall on deaf ears, as gamers have grown tired of being blamed for inferior products failing to meet unrealistic expectations. Furthermore, it would seem that Highguard's "last ride" will be a bit of a disappointment, as fewer than 500 concurrent players even checked in today on Steam to give it one last go. While this number could increase in the next few hours, it is ultimately irrelevant, as Highguard has already earned its legacy of becoming Concord 2.
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