Highguard studio CEO: We’d be ‘foolish’ to turn down The Game Awards

Highguard’s TGA placement was ‘a little risky in hindsight’

While The Game Awards is ostensibly an award show, it’s just as much a vehicle for trailers and game reveals. The 2025 show’s capstone? Highguard, a new free-to-play “raid shooter” from a studio founded by Titanfall and Apex Legends veterans. Its reveal certainly made a splash (for good and bad), but Highguard wasn’t supposed to be The 2025 Game Awards’ finale. In fact, it originally wasn’t supposed to be in the show at all.

Originally, developer Wildlight intended to shadowdrop its debut live-service shooter today, Jan. 26. “Our plan was always to surprise launch [like] Apex,” Wildlight founder and CEO Dusty Welch told Polygon in an interview at a recent press event for Highguard. Ultimately, though, Keighley presented Wildlight with an offer it couldn’t refuse.

Keighley is “a friend of the studio,” Welch noted. They’ve known each other since before the first Titanfall, and Keighley even wrote The Final Hours of Titanfall, a behind-the-scenes look at Respawn Entertainment. (Keighley did not respond to a request for comment from Polygon for this story.)

During Highguard’s development, Keighley visited the studio a couple of times and “loved” the game. ”He proposed to us doing something which he said was kind of unique and maybe a little risky in hindsight,” Welch said, “which was take an indie free play game and kind of promote the indie space.”

Debuting at The Game Awards would be quite the detour away from the initial plans of a shadowdrop, but, as Welch viewed it, Wildlight “would be foolish to [...] turn down The Game Awards and what was the last spot and all the awareness that would come from that.”

Wildlight quickly “rushed” together a trailer that was “meant to entertain, and perhaps we failed at that. We needed a trailer that could show the loop, which I think would be a little hard to do in that setting.”

Despite the poor reception to that trailer, which spurred many on social media and in comments sections to wonder if Highguard will be the next big live-service misfire, Wildlight doesn’t regret taking Keighley’s offer. “We heard the feedback, but this team is experienced. They're resilient,” Welch said. “So we just kept quiet, took a little bit of lumps, and learned.”

Wildlight always intended for Highguard to speak for itself, and now that it’s out and free to play on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, it can do exactly that. “At the end of the day, let's just put the game out there and let people decide for themselves.”