Bonus: Games whose deaths were announced in 2020
What kind of games are these? Although we still have 2020, there are already four titles that have announced their shutdown for 2021. We will briefly introduce these 4.
Life is Feudal
Life is Feudal (short: LiF) is a medieval MMO where the sandbox aspect is in the foreground. Your task is to survive in a harsh world. To do this, you gather resources, build tools and weapons, can construct buildings, and attack other players in PvP.
LiF places great emphasis on high difficulty and realism. It was released on January 18 in Early Access on Steam and switched to Free2Play in 2019.
2020 was supposed to be a good year for the game, but there was a legal dispute with the publisher. Since the developers lack the funds for this, they are abandoning the game. On January 18, Life is Feudal will be discontinued as an MMO.
The “Your Own” version is not affected.
Battleborn
Battleborn is a hero shooter that was released in 2016 and announced its demise in 2017. Since then, the game has not been further developed as the developers were needed for work on Borderlands 3.
The game rarely reaches 100 players on Steam anymore. In the last 30 days, it had only 31 players online at peak even (via Steamcharts).
In January 2021, the servers are set to be permanently shut down.
Darwin Project
Darwin Project is a free-to-play battle royale that visually resembles Fortnite. However, there are significant gameplay differences:
- Only 10 players compete against each other.
- Weapons used include an axe, a bow, and various skills that can be unlocked during a match.
- There are no possibilities to build anything, aside from crafting your own arrows.
- There is a game master who can influence the events. They determine which areas of the battlefield shrink, can drop bombs in specific zones, or provide players with health or speed boosts.
With this concept, they aimed to attract some fans of well-known “battle royale” titles. Darwin Project was released in January 2018 on Xbox One and in Early Access on Steam. In 2018, the game switched to Free2Play. In 2020, it was released on PS4, but only 4 months later, it was discontinued there.
It is now clear that Darwin Project will not be developed further. However, when exactly the servers will be shut down is still unknown.
Realm Royale
Realm Royale was originally created as a battle royale mode for the hero shooter Paladins. With it, they aimed to compete with Fortnite and PUBG, but not everyone should play the same champion; instead, players had a selection.
Hi-Rez decided against the idea of having a massive champion pool like in Paladins due to strong backlash from the Paladins community. Instead, players chose from 5 classes. What ultimately came out as “Realm Royale” was a battle royale like Fortnite but with elements of a fantasy RPG, like WoW.
Realm Royale launched strongly. At release in June 2018, there were up to 104,557 players online simultaneously on Steam. However, many players did not stay. It is now known that the game was a financial flop.
The servers are said to continue running indefinitely, but there are no more updates for the game.
This concludes this list of games that we could no longer play in 2020. However, there were not only closures this year. Several new games were also released. Here you can find the new MMORPGs that were released in 2020:
