The survival MMO Rend launched in 2017 with the announcement that they wanted to combine the best of WoW and LoL and become a bigger hit than ARK. In 2018, the game was released on Steam. For a while, Rend seemed like a promising candidate in the MMO genre. But in 2020, the servers were shut down.
What was the launch of Rend? In March 2017, the Frostkeep Studios announced their new survival MMO Rend at Pax East. Members of the studio had previously worked on titles like WoW, LoL, and WildStar.
The team’s goal was to surpass the then and still popular dinosaur survival MMO ARK Survival Evolved and make survival MMOs a mainstream hit. Just like Blizzard saw “Everquest” back then and turned it into WoW, Rend wanted to evolve the genre and take it to the next level.
To do this, they wanted to take what was good in survival MMOs, supplement it with MOBA elements, and thus develop an exciting game.
Everything the developers said sounded coherent. In addition, the game looked good, and it was promised great potential at launch on Steam. However, the hope that Rend would develop into a strong new MMO came to nothing.
After Early Access on Steam, players left Rend
This is how it went:
- In August 2018, Rend entered Early Access on Steam as a new indie game.
- There, Rend was able to find a player base of 1800 players on average in the first month, but it didn’t last. (via steamcharts)
- By September 2018, there were only 310 players on average online.
- In October 2018, there were only 95 active players on Steam on average.
- An official release in March 2019 did not change the downward spiral, Rend simply had hardly any players left on Steam. This ultimately means a death sentence for MMOs, as fewer and fewer players can be found for matches.
- From May 2019, Rend’s player base completely collapsed, with player numbers on Steam sinking to 37, and later even to an average of 12 active players.
What do the Steam reviews say? The reviews of the past months for Rend can be roughly summarized as “Great game, unfortunately the developers gave up, now nobody plays it anymore and it is dead.”
This has long been the criticism of Rend: Much potential, too little engagement from the developers.
Rend is closing on January 31st – All servers will go down
This is how it ends now: After it had already been quiet around Rend since early 2019, the developers are now finally drawing the consequence from the miserable player numbers.
Rend will close on January 31, 2020. The developers say that the game currently has too few players for the original vision to work. Therefore, they will take down all public servers on Friday, January 31.
The developers state that they will not support private servers of Rend, but they also will not interfere with them.
