Warhammer 40,000: Regicide has been suddenly removed from Steam

rockpapershotgun.com:

Released seven years ago, Warhammer 40,000: Regicide offers a kind of far future murder-chess. Although really that should be "offered". Earlier today, Regicide's developers announced on Steam that the game had been taken off sale and its servers closed down. In the brief announcement, developers Hammerfall Publishing say only that they "will be venturing into new and exciting projects in the future."

The post over on Steam begins by talking about user stats over the past seven years, then hard pivots. "Unfortunately, we regretfully announce the immediate closure of the servers and will be unlisting the Steam Release, Google Play Store, and the Apple App Store from Today, the 19th of October, 2022."

"For Game Preservation, Offline mode will still work for prior installs," it adds.

Confusingly, there appears to be an identical announcement on the Regicide website, except that one says the servers were closed and Regicide delisted on "Today, the 14th of October, 2022."

Regicide hasn't had more than double digit player numbers since 2016, with its all-time peak being 516 concurrent players 7 years ago, according to SteamDB. Still, it's not ideal when a game that people paid for suddenly loses a chunk of its functionality - and particularly when it happens without warning.

Regicide is most easily described as "40K chess", but it had a good deal more going on than just checkered floors and chainsaw animations. RPS never reviewed it either in its early access period or in its final form, but, uh, commenter Lord Custard Smingleigh did write that, "A lot of people will hate it for adulterating chess, but I love it for adding chess's rigour and strategy to an otherwise light wargame."