From being showcased last as “the big game” at the 2025 game awards to now losing over 90% of its player base within one week, Highguard is a game which teaches us very much what the danger of hype can do to a game and the gaming industry.

But you may be thinking, 'Why and how does this teach us about why the danger of hype is bad?' Well, today we are going to explain why and also why Highguard seems to have missed the mark in general.

Hype kills 

Now to start off with the first point, hype is one of the most dangerous phenomena in the gaming industry. Time and time again we have seen a plethora of games or companies overpromise or just straight-up lie about what a game is going to be or look like, and therefore set themselves up for failure, as the company and game cannot simply match or meet the expectations that have been set. And sadly Highguard is one of those games.

Originally Highguard was going to be a shadow dropped game as its from a small development team of 6 and it was supposed to be a small drop to get feedback from players and see what the team (Wildlight Entertainment) could fix and change with their game.

However unfortunately due to this game being “THE CLOSER OF THE GAME AWARDS” which had over 170 million global viewers (woah) this then put an insane amount of spotlight on a game which simply was not ready for that kind of spotlight.

Okay so it's overhyped but what about the game itself?

Now this is also where the problems of hype have rooted themselves deeper. When talking about Highguard we aren't really talking about a fully released fully stable version of a game. You see whilst Highguard as a game has a lot of potential and has some good things going for it (art style, core gameplay) the game in its current state is not great and again that is due to being released earlier than it should due to hype.

This is clearly a game which one should have released in a beta for testing and player feedback and two just needed more time than it had to be fully released. However, due to the hype, this game went from a “Oh hey, this is a cool game” to “OMG, wow! This is the last game shown at the game awards. This must be incredible!!!!! ” the game had to be released in a time frame that it simply wasn't ready to be released in.

So what we have here is a game which, whilst not terrible at all and in fact has good promise, unfortunately, the way Highguard has missed the mark is simply due to the fact that the game has been released in a beta state when people were expecting a game-changing, life-altering experience.

What does this teach us?

We here at inviox want to say it's important to note we have nothing but respect for the folks over at Wildlight Entertainment as making a game is incredibly hard and could be an article in and of itself. However, Highguard is a truly important game to talk about, as it highlights exactly the danger of what hype can do to a game and why hype around games always needs to be met with a hint of care and scepticism, or else you could end up with a situation very similar to this.