Hero shooter Highguard reportedly didn’t even pay for the Game Awards slot that’s earned it so much preemptive hate—the showrunners thought it deserved the spotlight

Remember when Apex Legends was shadow dropped? It’s a risky move for such a high-profile game to skip all the pre-release marketing hype entirely, but it paid off, and it’s clear why Respawn went that route—”photoreal PvP hero shooter” was an eyeroll-inducing prospect even back in 2019, so letting the game speak for itself short-circuited any pre-release angst.

We don’t know if the strategy could have been replicated, but would it have been worse than the late Concord’s legendary failure or the reaction to the recently announced Highguard, which was the final big reveal at last year’s Game Awards? Viewers expecting something like 2023’s Monster Hunter Wilds reveal or the one-two Matrix Unreal Engine 5 tech demo and Matrix 4 trailer in 2021 have been taking out their frustrations on Highguard.

The reveal was drowned out by hot takes calling out its “Concord vibes” and it received a ghastly 2,400 dislikes on YouTube compared to around 500 likes when it first dropped. There’s been an assumption to some of the criticism that Highguard wanted this smoke, so to speak—an idea that if the Highguard studio hadn’t splurged on such an exclusive spot, it wouldn’t have earned all this ire.

As it turns out, no money changed hands for Highguard to get the catbird seat. A report from Forbes confirmed that it didn’t pay for the spot at all despite other developers paying six-figure sums just to get a 60-second trailer into the show. Forbes explained: “Reportedly, showrunner Geoff Keighley just really liked the game and offered it to them.”

That’s gotta be a bummer for the Highguard team, and almost certainly not what Keighley intended. As PC Gamer US news lead Andy Chalk noted in his piece on the reveal, the game doesn’t look abysmal, it just looks common and a little drab. Games with more egregious sins have received less vitriol.

The free spot, which theoretically should have been a huge marketing boost, has now handed it an uphill battle to win people over. Rather than being just another hero shooter—a potent enough negative to kill Concord in mere weeks—it’s now that hero shooter.

I’m not gobsmacked by Highguard either, but it strikes me as a particularly unwitting and undeserving target for the sort of gleeful, vibes-based, memetic hate we see bubbling up from videogame-likers every few months⁠—see also Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Star Wars: Outlaws, even a half-hearted attempt to skewer Avowed for being woke or whatever.