Crowfall is a Kickstarter MMORPG that celebrated its release in 2021 after nearly seven years of development. But it did not start well. From the beginning, player numbers were lower than expected; after a few weeks, hardly anyone was talking about the game anymore. Now it will go offline for a while to return with new content.
What will happen to Crowfall? On November 22 at 18:00 German time, Crowfall will be shut down. The servers will no longer be accessible from then on.
The developers explain that it is incredibly exhausting for them to operate an MMORPG live while also working on new content and campaigns. That is why the live service will be shut down until Crowfall is in a state where it can be released again.
- Already now, support will only be available from Monday to Friday between 16:00 and 3:00 at night. It will only deal with account restorations.
- Refunds will be processed automatically, but only for purchases made in the last 90 days.
- Certain services like downloading the game or the “Refer a friend” program have already been shut down.
How long the servers will remain offline is currently unclear. It has also not been revealed what new features are being worked on.
Crowfall was meant to bring fresh air to PvP MMORPGs
What kind of game is Crowfall? In 2015, Crowfall was announced as a game that would play like a season of Game of Thrones. Various campaigns were planned that players could win, thereby gaining advantages in the Eternal Kingdoms.
The Eternal Kingdoms are a persistent, social world where there is no PvP, but players can showcase their achievements and earn fame and recognition. Other campaigns were supposed to end regularly and return with new rules.
Additionally, a wide class system was announced, with 11 classes and a total of 33 subclasses. However, this took a lot of development time.
How did the release go? Rather slow. Crowfall was in a kind of open alpha for years, allowing all fans to constantly observe the progress. However, the official release took a long time. When the MMORPG finally launched in July 2021, many fans had already moved on and the hype was absent.
Moreover, there were numerous issues at launch, including poor optimization and performance, a clunky interface, a rather weak tutorial, and a boring crafting system. The PvP focus likely also discouraged many potential buyers.
Crowfall has already been sold and may never return
What does the future hold for Crowfall? Uncertain. As early as September 2021, there were initial layoffs. In December 2021, the game and its developers were sold to a new studio. The new owner, Monumental, is actually a developer of mobile games.
What exactly the studio plans to do with Crowfall is unknown. However, the reason for the temporary shutdown is very difficult. A service game actually lives off being operated in live mode. A shutdown for a complete restructuring is expensive.
While this worked for Final Fantasy XIV, some other MMORPGs that took a similar step just never came back online. This could potentially also happen to Crowfall.
I myself predicted back in early 2022 which MMOs would likely die in 2022. Crowfall was one of them:
