After a promising start with nearly 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, the number of active users has fallen below 5,000. Mass layoffs have occurred within the team, and former employee Josh Sobel has publicly pointed to the "culprits," players and content creators on YouTube.
According to him, the problem wasn't the quality of the game, but a "mass hate campaign and misinformation." Before the official presentation, reviews were positive, but after the release trailer, "hell broke loose": memes like "Concord 2" or "Titanfall 3 died for this" and review-bombing with more than 14,000 negative reviews from players who spent less than an hour in the game.
Sobel believes that consumers invested an "absurd amount of effort" in denigrating the game, which scared away potential audiences.
In online discussions about Highguard, Concord, 2XKO, and similar projects, players often note that developers like to blame gamers for their failures, which is silly. As if players have no influence. But they do. A significant amount. I'm not saying that our failure is entirely the fault of gamer culture and that the game would have succeeded without the negative discourse, but it definitely played a role. All products depend on the whims of consumers, and consumers put an absurd amount of effort into denigrating Highguard. And it worked.
At the same time, critics point to the studio's mistakes: refusing open beta tests, betting on controversial mechanics, and releasing yet another free-to-play game in an oversaturated market. Currently, Wildlight Entertainment has left a "core" of developers to support Highguard, but with such a small player base, the project's future is highly questionable.