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Highguard trailer fan reaction has former Apex Legends developer rethinking marketing strategy

After revealing the game at The Game Awards 2025, Wildlight Entertainment made the odd decision to not market Highguard ahead of its release date

Highguard Screenshot — Image credit: Wildlight Entertainment

News by Trent Cannon, Senior Contributing writer

Published on Tue Jan 27 2026

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The latest entry in the increasingly crowded PvP shooter genre is Highguard, whose release date landed yesterday after a tumultuous month-and-a-bit since its reveal at The Game Awards 2025. While the game has had decent reviews, players seemed to have decided Highguard’s fate long before it came out, thanks to its seemingly bizarre marketing strategy of… not marketing itself. Turns out, that is something former Apex Legends developer Dusty Welch, CEO of Wildlight Entertainment, is kicking himself for.

Cast your mind back to the distant time of December 2025. At The Game Awards, the final reveal trailer of the night was for Highguard, a hitherto unknown game from the studio founded by former Apex Legends GM Dusty Welch. The trailer was very pretty and full of action, but it didn’t do anything to show how Highguard would stand out against the other free-to-play PvP shooters out there. It was all a bit generic, to be honest, and gamers weren’t shy about making that known.

Following that reaction, Wildlight Entertainment made the decision to say absolutely nothing. Because that had been their plan all along. Speaking to PC Gamer at a launch event last week, creative director Jason McCord said the idea was to emulate the Apex Legends launch in 2019, which was shadow-dropped without any marketing and immediately spread through word of mouth.

“The trailer at The Game Awards was meant to be an announcement trailer,” McCord said. “The plan was to announce, go dark, and then the next thing that we want players to see is the game. If the reception had been totally different, it would have been the same plan. The key is, you’ve got to play the game.”

“Look, I wish Highguard had been received better,” Welch admitted in the same interview. “Part of that’s on us, right? We didn’t put our heads in the sand. We, as a team, saw the feedback. We’re gamers ourselves. We’re online ourselves reading the feedback. 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. So that’s on us. We take that, but the team is resilient.”

Highguard is now available to play.

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