Why Highguard Failed on Steam: A Marketing Disaster Case Study [2025]

How a 100,000-Player Launch Turned into a Steam Disaster: The Highguard Marketing Failure

Something weird happened on January 27, 2025. A brand-new free-to-play shooter from the folks who made Apex Legends and Titanfall hit 97,249 concurrent players on launch day. That's not bad. That's actually solid. But within hours, it tanked to a "Mostly Negative" rating on Steam, landing somewhere between 13,363 negative reviews and 6,027 positive reviews. The ratio is brutal.

The game is called Highguard, and its story is a textbook case of how you can nail one part of game development (making something people actually want to play) while completely botching another (telling people what they're getting into).

Wildlight Entertainment CEO Dusty Welch saw it coming. He knew the trailer at The Game Awards last month didn't land right. He knew the radio silence after that announcement felt suspicious to players. He knew something was off. But knowing and preventing are two different things, and by the time launch rolled around, the damage was already done.

Here's the thing: this isn't just about one game's failure. It's about how modern gaming culture works, why marketing matters more than most developers admit, and what happens when you treat your audience like they'll just show up anyway. Spoiler alert: they won't.

The Setup: Everything Looked Perfect on Paper

Wildlight Entertainment had every reason to be confident going into the announcement. The team included veterans from Respawn Entertainment who'd worked on Apex Legends and Titanfall. These aren't randos. These are people who've shipped two of the most successful multiplayer games in recent memory.

They created a free-to-play PvP shooter and got featured at The Game Awards, arguably the biggest stage in gaming announcements. Geoff Keighley, the ceremony's host, actually played Highguard beforehand and loved it enough to want something different from his usual mega-franchise reveals. That's credibility you can't buy.

The strategy made sense at a surface level: build hype through The Game Awards, announce a January 26, 2025 release, let people speculate and build anticipation over a month, then launch the game. Simple. Clean. Should work.

But then something happened that changed everything. After The Game Awards, Wildlight went completely dark. No social media updates. No dev blogs. No community posts. Nothing.

For a month straight, players heard nothing. In the internet age, silence isn't neutral. Silence is a message, and the message people received was: something's wrong. The game's getting delayed. The team abandoned it. There's internal drama. Whatever it was, the vacuum filled itself with speculation, and speculation almost always trends negative.

Highguard received significantly more negative reviews (13,363) compared to positive ones (6,027) on Steam, reflecting its 'Mostly Negative' rating.

The Announcement: A Trailer That Missed the Mark

Let's talk about what actually happened at The Game Awards. Geoff Keighley announced Highguard as his "one last thing" of the night. The trailer showed quick cuts, some action, quick flashes of gameplay, and... honestly, not much. It was energetic. It had a vibe. But it didn't explain what made this game different from the dozen other shooters competing for attention.

CEO Dusty Welch later admitted the trailer was designed to entertain at The Game Awards specifically. That's the core problem right there. A Game Awards reveal trailer has a different job than a game launch trailer. The former needs to be spectacle. The latter needs to sell a vision.

Welch said: "I think, ultimately, we could have made a different trailer – a better trailer that wasn't about entertaining, which is what we think [The Game Awards] was about. We could have made something that did a better job of highlighting the unique loop of the game."

That's a direct admission that the trailer prioritized the moment over the message. It worked for a ten-second reaction in a theater. It didn't work for convincing 100,000 players to spend their free time in your world.

The response to the trailer was "lukewarm" according to reports. Lukewarm is worse than bad. Bad gets people talking. Lukewarm gets people shrugging and moving on.

The Radio Silence: When Marketing Becomes Damage Control

After the Game Awards, Wildlight went completely silent. Design and creative director Jason McCord defended this later: "The trailer at The Game Awards was meant to be an announcement trailer. The plan was to announce, go dark, and then the next thing that we want players to see is the game."

So it was intentional. They decided radio silence was the marketing strategy.

Here's where strategy meets reality, and they don't match up. Yes, some games have launched with minimal pre-release marketing and succeeded. But those games either had massive brand recognition or they didn't have a public stumble first. Highguard had a public stumble. The trailer didn't land. The community noticed. Then the silence made people wonder if the studio was panicking.

In modern gaming, especially with competitive multiplayer games, momentum is everything. You need to build community before launch. You need streamers testing the game. You need content creators making videos. You need Reddit threads and Discord servers and community-driven hype. All of that takes time to build, and all of it requires communication.

Instead, Wildlight effectively said: "We're stepping away for a month. See you at launch." For a new IP with a lukewarm reception to its announcement, that's not confidence. That looks like panic.

One month of silence is an eternity in gaming news cycles. News moves fast. Games launch constantly. Attention is a finite resource, and Wildlight voluntarily gave away theirs.

Highguard received a significantly higher number of negative reviews compared to positive ones, contributing to its 'Mostly Negative' rating on Steam.

Launch Day: The Moment of Truth

On January 27, 2025, Highguard became available on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S. It was a proper multi-platform launch. No exclusivity games, no platform wars. The infrastructure was there. The game was real.

And immediately, 97,249 concurrent players logged in. That number is legit impressive for a new IP from an indie studio (well, indie-adjacent—they have serious talent). For context, that's more concurrent players than most established games see on a random Tuesday. It meant the actual game had appeal.

But here's the critical part: 97,000 concurrent players on day one doesn't mean 97,000 happy players coming back on day two. Launch day captures two categories: people genuinely excited about the game, and people curious about what all the fuss is about. The second group can evaporate overnight if they're disappointed.

Within days, Highguard hit "Mostly Negative" status on Steam. The ratio tells the story: for every positive review, there were two negative ones. That's not a mixed reception. That's rejection.

Why Players Actually Left: The Real Issues

Here's where things get interesting. Dusty Welch said he wished the feedback had been better. But what was the feedback actually about? Was it about the game itself being bad? Or was it about expectations being misaligned?

When you read negative reviews, they fall into different buckets. Some are about core gameplay issues: "Servers are laggy," "The gunplay feels weird," "Performance is bad." Those are technical problems the studio can fix.

But other reviews point to something deeper. Players felt misled. The announcement trailer didn't set expectations correctly. The radio silence made them suspicious. By the time they launched, people were jumping in with frustration already primed.

This is the marketing-to-product gap. When your marketing doesn't accurately represent your product, two things happen. First, you attract the wrong players—people who think they're getting game X when they're actually getting game Y. Second, you poison word-of-mouth before launch day even happens.

Highguard wasn't helped by a general sentiment that free-to-play shooters are oversaturated. When players see a new game in a crowded genre, they need a reason to believe this one is worth their time. Highguard's marketing didn't provide that reason. It just asked for trust.

The Lesson: Why Transparency Beats Silence

Welch said the team is "resilient," which is corporate-speak for "we're going to keep working on this." And they should. They have the talent and resources to improve things.

But the bigger lesson here is about marketing strategy in the 2025 gaming landscape. Radio silence doesn't build momentum. It builds suspicion. Transparency does build momentum.

Imagine if, instead of going dark, Wildlight had done this: posted a developer diary about the game's core mechanics, shared gameplay clips, streamed some early matches, let the community ask questions on Discord, posted updates to Twitter. Nothing fancy. Just presence.

Would that have guaranteed success? No. But it would've prevented the narrative of abandonment from forming. It would've given potential players actual information to make decisions on. It would've provided content creators material to work with. It would've kept the community engaged through the announcement-to-launch gap.

Instead, Wildlight chose the traditional indie silence approach, forgetting that The Game Awards announcement puts you in the mainstream spotlight whether you like it or not. Once you're on that stage, you can't just disappear.

Estimated data shows a decline in community engagement and media coverage during a month of marketing silence, potentially impacting game launch success.

The Game Awards as a Double-Edged Sword

Here's something worth examining: was being at The Game Awards a good thing or a bad thing for Highguard?

On the surface, it's amazing. You get exposure to millions of viewers. Geoff Keighley's endorsement carries weight. You're officially on the map.

But there's a trap in major event announcements. You're now held to a higher standard. Players expect bigger games from Game Awards reveals. They expect polish, clarity, and follow-through. An indie studio can build a cult following quietly. Once you're announced at a major event, expectations reset.

Welch understood this. He said: "As an indie who was unknown by choice, who wouldn't jump at the chance to do that? Here's the biggest platform [in gaming], right?"

The problem is, biggest platform also means biggest audience for disappointment. If Highguard had launched with minimal announcement through a Reddit post or Discord community, missed expectations would affect hundreds of people. Instead, it affected hundreds of thousands.

That's the trade-off nobody talks about. Fame and obscurity are both marketing strategies. Fame gets you reach. Obscurity gets you forgiveness.

The Trailer Problem: Form vs. Function

Let's get specific about why the announcement trailer flopped. Welch admitted it prioritized entertainment over information. That's a legitimate choice for a moment of spectacle. But it has consequences.

Think about what players needed to know from that trailer:

What's the game's core loop? Show me what I'll actually be doing for the next hour. Are we running around a map? Are we defending positions? Are we in close quarters? The trailer didn't make this clear.

What makes this different from other shooters? Respawn made Apex Legends, which had unique characters with special abilities. Does Highguard have that? Does it have something else? The trailer didn't answer this.

What's the vibe? Tone matters. Is this serious tactical gameplay? Is it arcade-y and fun? Is it story-driven? The quick cuts made it hard to feel what the game actually feels like to play.

What platforms is it on? The trailer mentioned PC and consoles, but which ones?

A better announcement trailer would've traded some spectacle for clarity. Show 15 seconds of actual gameplay. Let us see what winning looks like. Explain the unique mechanic in 30 seconds. That's boring compared to Geoff's stage presence, but it actually sells the game.

Welch said they could have made a "different trailer—a better trailer." That implies they know what the better version would've looked like. The studio has the talent to make it. So why didn't they?

Probably because they were optimizing for The Game Awards moment, not for the long-term launch success. That's a prioritization error that haunted them.

The Community Gap: What Streamers and Content Creators Needed

Let's think about the people who could've helped Highguard succeed: streamers, content creators, gaming media, Reddit mods.

All of these people had the same experience: a lukewarm announcement trailer followed by a month of silence. If you're a streamer trying to decide what to stream on launch day, you need information. You need to know if your audience will care. You need clips, developer commentary, and excitement building in the community.

Wildlight provided none of that. They radio silence signaled: "We don't need your help." So streamers moved on. They prepped streams for other games. They made other plans.

When launch day came, there was no built-in content creator ecosystem already primed to cover Highguard. That's a massive missed opportunity. Streamers ARE marketing. They're unpaid marketing that's actually credible because their viewers trust them.

A better strategy would've been: get five high-profile streamers early access two weeks before launch. Let them stream it. Let clips go viral. Let Discord communities form around those streams. By launch day, the game already has momentum through organic, trust-based marketing.

Instead, Highguard launched cold into a skeptical market. The viewers who saw the lukewarm trailer month ago weren't reminded why they should care. New players didn't have trusted voices saying "this game is actually good." The community creation layer was missing.

Misleading marketing was the primary reason players left Highguard, followed by technical issues. Estimated data based on feedback themes.

Free-to-Play as Marketing Advantage (Wasted)

Highguard is free-to-play. That's a huge marketing advantage that somehow didn't help.

Free-to-play removes the friction of purchase. Anyone can download it and try it. That should mean rapid adoption. It should mean word-of-mouth travels faster because the only investment is time, not money.

But free-to-play only works as marketing if people know about it. If the awareness game is weak, free-to-play just means nobody you've never heard of gets access to your game. The barrier-to-entry advantage evaporates.

Wildlight could've leaned into this. "Free to play, free to try, free to leave if you don't like it." That's a powerful message. But you have to actually tell people.

Instead, they assumed the Game Awards announcement plus launch day was enough. It wasn't. Free-to-play needs continuous word-of-mouth. It needs new players constantly hearing about it from friends. That only happens if the game is constantly being talked about. Wildlight's silence prevented that.

The Competitive Landscape: Why Timing Matters

Highguard launched into a brutal landscape. There's Valorant, Counter-Strike 2, Apex Legends (ironically, made by some of the same studio), Call of Duty, Overwatch 2, Destiny 2, and dozens of other shooters already claiming players' attention.

When players have ten established games to choose from, a new game needs either: a compelling reason to switch (unique mechanic, better gameplay, better community), or momentum (friends are playing it, streamers are playing it, it's the new hotness).

Highguard had neither on launch day. The marketing didn't establish a unique identity. The momentum-building phase (the announcement-to-launch window) was wasted on silence.

Perfect product would've survived this. But Highguard isn't perfect. No game is. So when players came in with mediocre expectations, and the game met those expectations with "pretty good but not exceptional" gameplay, they left. The marketing had positioned the game as an unknown quantity, and the game itself wasn't unknown enough to overcome the skepticism.

What Steam's Rating System Actually Means

Wildlight is fixating on the "Mostly Negative" rating, but it's worth understanding what that actually represents.

Steam reviews are influenced by several factors: the game itself, the player's expectations going in, and the player's experience relative to alternatives. A game that's objectively pretty good can get negative reviews if expectations were inflated or if players feel misled.

Highguard's negative review ratio suggests that last factor was at play. Players expected something based on the announcement. The game didn't meet those expectations. The announcement trailer had built up certain ideas (entertainment, spectacle, something special), and the game couldn't match that tone or promise.

This is fixable. Bad gameplay is hard to fix fast. But expectations are fixable. The studio can release a real gameplay trailer showing the core loop. They can post dev updates. They can engage with the community and show that they're listening. The negativity momentum can reverse.

But it requires work, communication, and time. It requires exactly the opposite of what they did pre-launch.

Games with effective marketing strategies see significantly higher adoption rates, even when free-to-play. Estimated data highlights the potential impact of marketing on game adoption.

The CEO's Perspective: Hindsight and Resilience

Welch's public comments show genuine frustration with how things went. He said: "I wish Highguard had been received better. I wish the feedback had been better."

That's real. He's not making excuses about haters or casuals. He's not blaming Steam or the gaming industry. He's saying, directly, "this is on us. We made mistakes."

Specifically, he admitted the trailer should've been different. He admits the team saw the negative feedback and understood it. He admits that instead of dismissing critics, they actually engaged with the feedback as gamers themselves.

That's a healthier response than typical. Lots of studios would've doubled down, blamed the community, or released a statement about "vision" and "misunderstood gameplay." Wildlight is doing the harder thing: accepting responsibility.

He said the team is "resilient," which in context means they're going to iterate, improve, and keep working. For a free-to-play game, that's actually the entire model. Launch is the beginning, not the end. The game will improve, features will be added, community will hopefully stabilize and grow.

But the perception problem is harder to fix than the gameplay problem. The negative reviews are public, permanent, and influential. New players will see "Mostly Negative" before deciding whether to download. That's a marketing artifact that will take months or years to recover from.

The Path Forward: What Comes Next

Highguard isn't dead. The studio has resources and talent. The game has 97,000 players on day one, which means there's a real audience. The core product is functional and playable.

What's needed now:

Rapid-fire communication. Dev updates weekly. Gameplay clips. Community engagement. Show that the team is actively working on improvements. This reverses the "abandoned game" perception fast.

Content creator strategy. Get copies to popular streamers with no strings attached. Let them play and talk about it honestly. If the game is actually fun to watch, that carries more weight than any marketing message.

Clear positioning. What is Highguard actually about? What does it do differently? A single clear message repeated everywhere beats a thousand vague mentions.

Balance and bug fixes. Any gameplay problems need fixing immediately. If the first week taught us the game has balance issues, patch it. Show the community you're listening.

Expectations management. Stop asking for love and trust. Show it through actions. Let the game speak. That builds earned respect instead of demanded attention.

The studio has all these ingredients available. The question is whether they'll execute them fast enough to build momentum before the player base shrinks further.

Lessons for Other Indie Studios

This is a teaching moment bigger than Highguard. Lots of studios are watching this unfold, and they should learn.

Marketing strategy and game design are connected. You can't separate them. A great game with bad marketing underperforms. A mediocre game with great marketing still disappoints. You need both.

Radio silence is not a strategy. It's the absence of strategy. In a connected world where information travels at light speed, silence is a message. It usually means something's wrong. Don't do it unless you have a specific reason and a plan to communicate that reason.

Announcement venues matter, but so does follow-through. Being on The Game Awards is great. But it commits you to a certain level of public engagement. You can't claim the platform's visibility and then disappear. You have to ride the wave you created.

Free-to-play needs constant word-of-mouth. You can't build a free-to-play community without communication. People need to be reminded constantly why they should play. That's the burden of the free-to-play model. If you can't commit to it, don't launch free-to-play.

Your community is your best marketing. If you're communicating with players, if you're transparent about problems and working on solutions, if you're showing them that they're heard—that becomes marketing that money can't buy. Wildlight forgot this pre-launch and paid the price.

The Bigger Picture: Modern Gaming and Marketing

Highguard is one game, one launch, one studio. But it's emblematic of a larger shift in how games are marketed and how communities form.

Ten years ago, a game could launch with less buzz and still succeed if the game itself was good. The bar for awareness was lower because the market was less saturated.

Now, there are hundreds of great games competing for attention. Being "pretty good" isn't enough. You need a narrative. You need momentum. You need a reason for people to try your game instead of one of the established alternatives.

Highguard had that opportunity with The Game Awards. It had that window during the announcement-to-launch period. It had 97,000 curious players on day one. And it fumbled all three things through poor marketing strategy.

This isn't unique to Highguard. This is the new reality of game launches. Marketing that worked ten years ago doesn't work now. Transparency works. Communication works. Engagement works. Radio silence doesn't.

The studios that understand this will thrive. The ones that treat marketing like an afterthought will keep having the same surprise when launch day goes sideways.

What This Means for Players

From a consumer perspective, Highguard's failure is actually useful. It's a reminder to wait, to watch, to let other people be guinea pigs.

If a game launches to negative reviews, that's not necessarily a reason to avoid it forever. It's a reason to wait two weeks, watch some actual gameplay from trusted streamers, read reviews from people whose taste aligns with yours. Sometimes games recover from bad launches. Sometimes the negativity was a misalignment of expectations, not a reflection of actual quality.

But in Highguard's case, the launch negativity was partly marketing failure, not entirely game failure. Which means there's a chance the game genuinely improves in perception if the studio handles the recovery correctly.

The lesson for players: be aware of the separation between game quality and marketing quality. They're connected, but they're not the same. A great-marketed bad game will disappoint. A poorly-marketed good game can recover. Judge Highguard in a few months, after the team has shown what they're actually doing with the feedback and the improvements they're making.

FAQ

What is Highguard?

Highguard is a free-to-play PvP multiplayer shooter developed by Wildlight Entertainment, featuring developers from Respawn Entertainment who worked on Apex Legends and Titanfall. The game launched on January 27, 2025, across PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S, but quickly accumulated "Mostly Negative" reviews on Steam despite attracting 97,249 concurrent players on its launch day.

Why did Highguard receive negative reviews on Steam?

Highguard's poor reception stems from a combination of marketing failures and misaligned expectations. The announcement trailer at The Game Awards prioritized entertainment and spectacle over explaining the game's core mechanics and unique features. Following the announcement, Wildlight Entertainment went silent for an entire month, which created suspicion among players that the game might be delayed or abandoned. When players finally got their hands on the game at launch, expectations were either unclear or unmet, resulting in the "Mostly Negative" rating with 13,363 negative reviews versus 6,027 positive reviews.

What did the CEO say about Highguard's poor launch?

Wildlight Entertainment CEO Dusty Welch acknowledged the marketing failures in interviews following launch, stating "I wish Highguard had been received better. I wish the feedback had been better." He specifically admitted that the Game Awards trailer could have been better at highlighting the game's unique loop instead of just entertaining. Welch attributed the silence before launch to an intentional plan to go dark after the announcement and resurface with the game itself, though he recognized this strategy may not have been appropriate given the lukewarm initial reception to the trailer.

How many players did Highguard have at launch?

Highguard achieved a peak of 97,249 concurrent players on its launch day (January 27, 2025), which is a significant number for a new IP from an indie studio. However, this strong launch failed to translate into sustained player retention, as the game quickly accumulated overwhelmingly negative reviews and a "Mostly Negative" overall rating on Steam.

What is the "Mostly Negative" rating on Steam?

The "Mostly Negative" rating on Steam indicates that a game has significantly more negative reviews than positive ones. In Highguard's case, the ratio is approximately 2.2 to 1 (negative to positive), meaning for every positive review, there are more than two negative reviews. This threshold typically indicates serious issues that players perceive with either the game itself, marketing expectations, or both.

Could Highguard have succeeded with better marketing?

Yes, substantially. The strong launch numbers suggest there was genuine interest in the game. Better marketing strategy—including a gameplay-focused announcement trailer that clearly communicated the game's unique mechanics, consistent community communication during the pre-launch period, content creator outreach, and transparency about what the game actually offers—could have set different expectations and prevented the perception gap that likely contributed to the negative reviews.

Key Takeaways

• Highguard launched with 97,249 concurrent players but declined to "Mostly Negative" Steam reviews within days due to marketing failures, not game quality
• CEO Dusty Welch admitted the Game Awards announcement trailer prioritized spectacle over explaining core gameplay mechanics and unique features
• One month of complete radio silence after announcement created player suspicion and killed momentum during the critical pre-launch marketing window
• Free-to-play games require continuous word-of-mouth and community engagement; radio silence strategy prevented necessary organic marketing from building
• Strong launch numbers proved audience interest existed, but poor marketing strategy and expectation mismanagement tanked player retention and trust

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