Major Games Closed in 2023, Many live services and online games had to close their doors this year.
Many games have had to call 2023 their last year and shut down for good. Some games survived for a few years, while others didn't even last a year. Getting a game to market is already hard enough, and now many of them are expected to be sustainable for several years. But online games don't last forever, and it feels like they only last a few years now.
There's no way of knowing exactly what went wrong for the many games that had to be cut short this year, but it's clear that gaining a foothold in a highly controversial genre has been extremely difficult. Creative forks of the most popular trends like extraction shooters don't guarantee you a place in live-service heaven. There's fierce competition out there, and unfortunately smart ideas aren't always enough.
The fate of new generation games: Major Games Closed in 2023. What have the players lost? Try to understand!
Here are the Big Games Closing in 2023 according to their latest announcements:
Spellbreak – Closed on January 10, 2023
Spellbreak had nearly five million players throwing spells at each other in the battle royale arena in 2020. It was a real surprise in a sea of mostly FPS games chasing the battle royale trend. However, two years later, its developer Proletariat announced that it had been acquired by Blizzard and would be shutting down the game. Spellbreak continued for a few more months and finally sealed its doors in January. Shortly thereafter, the developers released a “community” version of the game on Itch.io so you can host your own servers.
Rumbleverse – shut down on February 28, 2023
A wrestling battle royale is a fun concept, but it wasn't fun enough for the Rumbleverse to take off the way its developer intended. Since its launch in 2022, Iron Galaxy has said that player numbers are not high enough and will shut down after just six months. The Rumbleverse featured a ridiculous art style and a mix of wrestling moves and fighting game mechanics that aren't found in battle royales still around today. According to Russell Adderson's impressions of the Rumbleverse, it had many systems that constantly pushed players to fight each other. Too bad it didn't catch on.
Babylon's Fall – Closed on February 27, 2023
Action game studio Platinum Games gave it six months before announcing it would remove Babylon's Fall. 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. As Anne-Marie Coyle wrote in our review of Babylon's Fall, it didn't quite work. Monotonous missions and a bland aesthetic prevented the developer from reaching the heights of its other games, such as Bayonneta and Nier: Automata. Babylon's Fall had only one concurrent player on Steam: journalist Dashiell Wood, who was disappointed to see the game leave after less than a year.
Blaseball – closed on June 2, 2023
I admit, I still don't fully understand what Blaseball is, but I was certainly aware of this phenomenon that was taking over the lives of my peers in 2020. It was a browser-based sports gambling simulation with fake teams and real horror. Developer Game Band turned Blaseball from a strange experiment into a wildly popular strategy game that's also a satire of modern sports fandom. People followed each season as closely as Game of Thrones for a very specific type of geek and then explained the wildly complex stories created by Blaseball and its cast. It was fascinating to hear, but early this year the twists, lore, and surprises started to fade away, and then Game Band released a brief announcement that it would be discontinuing Blaseball immediately. RIP Blaseball.
Knockout City – Closed on June 6, 2023
Knockout City only lasted two years before its developer, Velan Studios, decided to shut it down. The team-based dodgeball game was not sustainable for the small studio, despite attracting more than 12 million players. He worked on the game for four years and published it under EA's Originals publishing label, before leaving EA in 2022 and becoming free-to-play. During the shutdown, Velan Studios said it would use what it learned from Knockout City in its next game; We know that this game is Hot Wheels Rift Rally, an AR racing game played with RC cars.
OnlyUp! – Closing September 8, 2023
OnlyUp! It took off on Twitch earlier this year with its ridiculous premise: climbing on top of random floating objects until you reach space. Solo developer SCKR Games has been accused of asset copying, copyright infringement, and alleged promotion of NFTs. There have been reports that at least one of these assets has been removed, but SCKR Games has remained largely silent until recent messaging. SCKR Games said they needed “peace and healing” and would be removing the game from Steam while they worked on a new project tentatively titled “Kith.” And that was the last news we heard from them.
Call of Duty: Warzone/Warzone Caldera – Closed on September 21, 2023
Call of Duty: Warzone hasn't been around long enough for every teenager who's spent hours on Activision's wildly successful battle royale spin-off to long for the good old days of growing up and hanging out with the team in the Caldera. Three years and a rebrand later, Activision has decided it's more than welcome for everyone to dive into Warzone 2. Although Activision promised to continue supporting the game to some degree, any cosmetics players purchased went with it. If Warzone's demise says anything about the state of live service games, it's that it doesn't matter how big they are or how much time and money you spend, they can disappear at any moment.
The Cycle: Frontier – Closed on September 27, 2023
A healthy player count of around 2.000 on Steam wasn't enough for The Cycle: Frontier, a PvPvE extraction shooter, lasting just over a year. When developer Yager announced that he would be shutting down the game, he said that the game was initially successful but was plagued with cheaters, which turned off many players from the game. PC Gamer's Morgan Park wasn't a fan of the game's focus on looting rather than shooting, but was impressed by how distinctly alien it looked. Unfortunately, many people apparently had their own issues with the game, and not enough people stayed with the game for Yager to continue developing the game.
Gundam Evolution – Closed on November 29, 2023
As a survivor of Overwatch, this is especially sad. Gundam Evolution was one of the few games I played that had a similar energy to 2016's Overwatch. The team-based mech FPS had tanks, support, and objectives to capture. The hardest part was getting used to playing as one machine rather than a bunch of different characters, which may have affected the declining number of players last year. In the short, final update, Bandai Namco promised to make several more updates and thanked players for sticking with the game for so long.
Battlefield: Bad Company 1 and 2 and Battlefield 1943 – shut down on December 8, 2023
EA announced in March that it would be shutting down three Battlefield games at once, including Battlefield: Bad Company 1, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 1943. Only Bad Company 2 came to PC and was named PC Gamer UK's shooter of the year in 2010. Many people praised the game for its still playable campaign, but many people spent a lot of time fighting in teams in its multiplayer modes. Unfortunately, there's no way to go back and see what Battlefield looked like 13 years ago.
The Day Before – Shutdown planned for January 22
Where should we start with The Day Before? Somehow we were all fooled into thinking that this survival MMO with impressive trailers and almost nothing else was going to be the next big thing, and—check the notes—it lasted four days. PC Gamer's Morgan Park explained the whole saga, but the TLDR is this: Developer Fntastic promised a massive survival game, gave no details about it for months, only to resurface with an eight-month delay to release a massively buggy game in November and it came out four days later. You can't buy the game anymore, but it's technically still playable… for now.
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