Former Highguard dev revises claim that backlash caused game's failure

With one day left before Highguard closes, Josh Sobel, formerly the lead technical artist, has walked back a raw, now-deleted February post on X. He said his initial reaction "was a mistake" that came from being "stressed, devastated, angry, and running on 2hrs sleep." In the deleted post he had written that "the hate started immediately" after the TGA trailer and that "we were turned into a joke from minute one," and he had implied the backlash played a large role in the game's demise.

In a later, more measured statement Sobel wrote: "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." He added that reactivating his account prompted him to address the deleted tweet as a mistake.

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