It’s always a tragic time when MMO games shut down. While the genre as a whole has never been better with the rise of online multiplayer bringing a surge of new games, it’s not always a happy ending. With competition for player attention and revenue at an all time high, some games and studios just cannot compete with what’s already established. With that said, here’s our list of five recently launched MMOs that shut down too soon.
5. LawBreakers
It’s been almost a year since E3 2017, where the game announced it was launching out of early access on August 8th 2017. LawBreakers had great ideas with its class systems that for an FPS arena shooter, felt well paced and executed in design. Unfortunately, operating in the shadow of Overwatch and rising games like PUBG did it no favors. In the past year alone, FPS online games ran amok with so many coming out, especially free to play titles. With LawBreakers being a buy to play game, it had another disadvantage. The rise of other games from the Battle Royale genre like Fortnite also gave players a reason to check out free to play titles with equal amounts of fun. In the end, Boss Key Productions announced a week after itself was revealed to be shutting down, that the lights would go out on LawBreakers come September 2018.
4. Cloud Pirates
Only a few months since its release, the plug was pulled on Cloud Pirates. The aerial PvP arena MMO did see some life during its run. The game utilized clever progression systems while keeping the focus on the fun team-based combat and air ship classes. Developers My.com still have not come out with any explanation or reasoning for sunsetting the game. For us inquisitive folks, its easy to see why. The PvP ship battle game just isn’t popular enough to gain the traction and playerbase it needs. According to game data tracking site SteamSpy, the average peak concurrent players on Steam isn’t great. It averages 200 players online at any one time, which is not at all healthy for an MMO of any kind.
3. MXM
NCSOFT is no stranger to shutting down games, and MXM is one of its latest titles to be axed. Released out of open beta and into the wilderness almost a year ago, MXM was considered by many, us included, to be a fresh take on the MOBA genre. The game’s roster of heroes includes fan-favorite characters from NCSOFT’s other games. This includes the likes of Guild Wars 2, Blade and Soul and Wildstar. However, for a game that was made to attract MOBA players, it didn’t hit whatever internal goal the company had set. As a result, MXM shut down on January 31st 2018. The good news is, the game did inspire a host of other similar games, like Battlerite.
2. Paragon
We see a theme here. If you’re going to make a brand new MOBA game, it needs to be bloody brilliant or no one’s going to be playing it. In Paragon’s case, this isn’t why the game shut down for good this April. Paragon was a decent MOBA that had all the right ingredients, but lacked the manpower to maintain. Epic Games – you know them as the creators of Fortnite – was simply swamped with the game that is making them rich. That’s Fortnite if you haven’t already guessed. Therefore, they announced that Paragon was difficult to maintain, and would rather focus their energies on a game that actually brings in the money. Makes sense.
1. Marvel Heroes
At top spot is Marvel Heroes, yet another superhero MMO game that lost to the bad guys. The bad guys here are the developers themselves. Marvel Heroes started off very well. Its blend of ARPG gameplay meets Iron Man and co worked pretty well on the PC. It’s the game that Marvel fans flocked to, to play as all the newly released Heros that came out with each MCU release. Where it all went wrong however, was with a greedy, hastily designed console port. The Omega launch alienated a majority of the core player-base. In addition to that, bad mismanagement at the top of Gazillion Entertainment didn’t help the developers’ cause. This resulted in Disney pulling the license. Marvel Heroes officially went dark in November last year. We’re still wondering if we’ll truly see a proper Marvel MMO.
