Several live service and online games had to close their doors this year.
Several games had to call 2023 their final year as they shut down for good. Some games survived a few years, while others didn’t even make it to one. It’s already hard enough to release a game and now many are expected to be sustainable for several years. But online games don’t last forever, and now it feels like they only last a few years.
There’s no way to know exactly what went wrong for many of the games that had to be cut short this year, but it’s clear that it’s extremely tough to claim a space in what is a very contentious genre. Creative forks of the most popular trends, like extraction shooters, don’t guarantee you a place in live service heaven. It’s cutthroat out there and unfortunately smart ideas aren’t always enough.
Here are the big games that had to shut down this year in order of their final announcements:SpellbreakSpellbreak – Shut down January 10, 2023
In 2020, Spellbreak had around five million players throwing magic at each other in its battle royale arena. It was a genuine surprise in a sea of mostly FPS games chasing the battle royale trend. But two years later, its developer Proletariat announced it had been bought by Blizzard and would shut the game down. Spellbreak continued on for a few months and finally sealed its doors in January. Soon after, the developers released a “community” version of the game on Itch.io so you can host your own servers. RumbleverseRumbleverse – Shut down February 28, 2023
A wrestling battle royale is a fun concept, but it wasn’t fun enough for Rumbleverse to take off like its developer wanted it to. Iron Galaxy said player numbers weren’t high enough since its 2022 release and that it would shut down after only six months. Rumbleverse had a goofy art style and a mix of wrestling moves and fighting game mechanics, the kind of stuff absent from the battle royales that are still around today. According to Russell Adderson’s Rumbleverse impressions, it had a lot of systems to nudge players into constantly brawling with each other. It’s too bad it didn’t catch on. Babylon’s FallBabylon’s Fall – Shut down February 27, 2023
Action game studio Platinum Games gave Babylon’s Fall six months before it announced it would take it down. Unlike some of Platinum’s most successful games, Babylon’s Fall was a fantasy action game where you could join other players to fight waves of enemies. It didn’t quite work, as Anne-Marie Coyle wrote in our Babylon’s Fall review. Monotonous quests and a bland aesthetic kept it from reaching the heights of the developer’s other games, like Bayonneta and Nier: Automata.
