Spellbreak brought fresh air to the shooter-heavy battle royale genre with a solid dose of magic. But soon it will be over: the game will close its servers.
What kind of game is this? Spellbreak is a battle royale. You fight to survive on an ever-shrinking map until only one person is left.
The special thing about the game: here you don’t have rifles or typical firearms as in Fortnite or Warzone, but genuine sorcery.
In Spellbreak, you gather items like runes, boots, or belts, as well as powerful spell gloves that give you different abilities.
The magical gloves grant you elemental magic like fire, rock, lightning, ice, wind, or poison. You could have two of them and freely combine them.
This results in crazy abilities. In Spellbreak, your mages can, for example, fly, summon storms, hurl burning rocks, or create ice walls. The imagination has few limits.
Overall, it felt a bit reminiscent of Avatar – The Last Airbender. With this approach, it even managed to attract players who usually don’t care for battle royale, as it captivated those who usually don’t care for battle royale.
This is how the game was received: Spellbreak is playable on PC, but also on PS4, Xbox One, and Switch, even with crossplay. Looking at Steam, you can see that the ratings are still strong to this day: 85% of the reviews on Steam are positive. Here, the praise for the unusual, unique gameplay stands out.
However, the criticism lies in the problem that it can take a long time to get into a game session. For here lies the problem: the player counts have dropped significantly. Apparently so much that it is now finally over for Spellbreak.
2023 is the end: “This is the farewell to Spellbreak”
As strong as the ratings on Steam are, the player counts themselves are weak. Spellbreak could never follow up on the good start at release – instead, the numbers continued to decline consistently, as the graph from SteamCharts shows:
The game apparently couldn’t recover from this crash, as the developers now announced the closure of the servers for early 2023 in an official statement. Thus, Spellbreak will remain for only about half a year – then it will be buried.
The developer team stated that after four years, they decided on this step: “Our vision was to create a fresh multiplayer action magic game with extraordinary movement possibilities and class customization that gives players the opportunity to unleash their inner battle mage,” the statement said.
“Spellbreak was an ambitious project where our team pushed new boundaries in design and development, and we look forward to creating new titles in the future.”
Similar sentiments were echoed by Seth Sivak, the CEO of developer Proletariat Inc., who addressed the fans on Reddit: “Unfortunately, the gaming industry is a tough business. Spellbreak was unable to make the breakthrough and achieve a sustainable position where we could continue to invest in the way we dreamed of,” Sivak explains.
It has been a hard road – and unfortunately, Spellbreak never got on track as it needed to: “This is the farewell to Spellbreak, but I cannot thank this community enough for the support and help along the way. Spellbreak has changed our studio and touched the lives of so many people. So once again: thank you” (via reddit).
In the initial reactions, some players mourn the game, but criticism is also expressed (via reddit). It has been too quiet around the game in recent months, there have been too few updates. After the initial hype, there simply hasn’t been enough from the special game.
For comparison: The last update for Spellbreak was pushed on September 1, 2021. It is unlikely that much more will come before Spellbreak shuts down in 2023.
Unfortunately, Spellbreak is not the only game that is meeting its end. In the podcast, the MeinMMO team discussed several games that have already died – and which ones might join them.
