Not all gaming stories end in success. Some of them, such as PlanetSide Arena, end with the termination of the game.

The development team behind  PlanetSide Arena, Daybreak Games, announced today that the servers for the game will be taken offline on January 10th, 2020. Taking place less than a month from now, this shut down comes just three months after PlanetSide Arena released for early access. The devs had the following to say in their official statement on the matter:

“After careful consideration, we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down PlanetSide Arena servers. While our team set out with an ambitious vision for a game that combined the massive-scale combat and camaraderie of PlanetSide through a diverse collection of new game modes, it has become clear after several months in Early Access that our population levels make it impossible to sustain the gameplay experience we envisioned. As a result, PlanetSide Arena will formally shut down servers on January 10th, 2020 at 5:00 PM (PST).”

Once the servers go offline on January 10th, that’ll be the end of the story. The game will be completely unplayable for everyone, regardless of how much you may have supported the early access.

On the upside, Daybreak isn’t just grabbing the money and running. They’re reported to be doing everything they can in conjunction with Steam to administer full refunds to those that have bought the game.

It’s unknown whether this also includes any of the DLC or in-game currency that may have been spent, though this likely won’t be refunded. Still, returning the game’s price is better than nothing, and a great gesture to show that the support didn’t go unseen.

The developers also insist that they’re still completely dedicated to the franchise and hope to find ways to return to it soon. PlanetSide is much more than this one game and there’s plenty for Daybreak to fall back on, though this remains a pretty heavy blow.

So why did it shut down? Part of that could be the interest of the community. As of now, it remains with only mixed reviews on Steam, which likely has to do with the shutdown. It’s pretty unlikely that they would be shutting down the servers to a popular game.

Advertisement

More than that, it could be the fact that there’s practically nobody playing the game. According to SteamDB, the record high of the game since release has been 1,506, which is abysmal for a game of this size. Regardless of the reason, it looks like the story of PlanetSide Arena will be ending at the New Year.