EA and Meta weren’t the only companies to ax games this week

theverge.com:

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

Over the course of this week, the developers of several major live service titles announced that their games would be shutting down. That means that players who actively enjoyed those games — and possibly spent money on them — might have to move on to something else.

The shutdowns are a reminder of the challenges facing these ambitious online titles. If they don’t quickly become massive hits, they might be closed down before they really have time to find their footing. Any new entrants have to fight an uphill battle to compete against juggernauts like Destiny 2, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Fortnite.

That means, for many of these newer games, they’re stuck in a chicken-and-egg situation: they need players to become a hit, but players may not want to jump in given the glut of other options available. And some games just need time to really catch on; Fortnite, for example, didn’t even launch as a battle royale.

Let’s go through what was shut down.

Apex Legends Mobile will shut down on May 1st at 7PM ET and won’t be refunding players for any real money they’ve spent in the game. The game launched on May 17th, 2022, meaning it didn’t even last a year.

Respawn Entertainment said that the game’s content pipeline “has begun to fall short” of its “bar for quality, quantity, and cadence,” which is why it and development partner Lightspeed & Quantum Studios (a Tencent studio) have decided to close the game down. You can still play the game ahead of the May 1st shutdown.

EA is also ending development on an in-development Battlefield mobile game that had been in testing.