These 9 Live-Service Games Launched And Died In Record Time

• February 10, 2022 - May 18, 2023

Crossfire is a very popular free-to-play military sim in South Korea and China. When it was eventually ported to the United States and Xbox, it came in a weird package featuring a broken, not-much-fun PVP multiplayer mode and a paid campaign expansion developed by Control and Alan Wake creators Remedy. The campaign was mildly interesting, but not great. And this weird experiment came to an end a little over a year after it began.

• August 8, 2017 - September 14, 2018.

Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski’s sci-fi cops vs robbers FPS looked cool and had some neat ideas, letting players manipulate gravity and shoot behind themselves while running. Unfortunately for the team, Lawbreakers just never found an audience large enough to support it and after just 13 months it was removed from storefronts and its servers were shut down.

• March 3, 2022 - February 27, 2023

Babylon’s Fall was Square Enix’s attempt at creating a new popular AAA online RPG franchise. But it was a big flop, with many players complaining about terrible microtransactions and blurry, ugly graphics. Just two weeks after release, Square Enix had to put out a statement that the game wasn’t dead. A few months later, just one person was still playing on PC. Square Enix eventually killed it just a few days shy of its one-year anniversary.

• May 17, 2022 - May 1, 2023

Apex Legends is a well-known and successful battle royale, and lots of people own smartphones, so it made sense to bring Legends to mobile devices. However, this didn’t work, with EA shutting down the free-to-play mobile port of Apex Legends just 11 months after launching it. EA and Respawn blamed a decline in quality for the cancellation, though many assumed it was a lack of players.

• August 11, 2022 - February 28, 2023

Most battle royale games feature guns and bombs. Rumbleverse went a different direction and mixed wrestling with battle royale mechanics. The end result was a fun PvP game that played unlike anything else. Sadly, Rumbleverse was shut down by Epic after just six months, robbing the world of one of the more silly and weird battle royales ever made.

• April 10, 2018 - July 8, 2018

Boss Key Productions, founded by Cliff Bleszinski, first worked on Lawbreakers. As mentioned already, that game ended up failing to find an audience. In a last-ditch effort to salvage the company, Radical Heights was released. It was very much a quickly-made and unfinished Fortnite-like battle royale with some BMX bikes and ‘80s-themed outfits. While the game had some fans, it wasn’t enough to save the studio, and a month later Boss Key shut down. However, Radical Heights stuck around until July.

• December 7, 2023- January 22, 2024

Zombie survival shooter The Day Before was one of Steam’s most wishlisted titles despite controversy over its volunteer devs and trademark infringement issues. The zombie MMO finally launched in Early Access on December 7, 2023. A few days later, the studio behind the game announced it was closing as fans complained that The Day Before was a barely playable mess and labeled the game a scam. It was removed from Steam and eventually, the servers were officially killed on January 22, 2024.

• August 23, 2024 - September 6, 2024

Concord, Sony’s big PS5 and PC live-service game, launched on August 23. Less than two weeks later, following incredibly low Steam player count numbers, Sony announced that the AAA FPS was going to shut down on September 6. That means Concord only lasted 14 days. It’s a shame that so much hard work and money is getting tossed into the bin so quickly, even if the studio behind the game suggests it could return one day.

• July 10, 2018 - July 18, 2018

The Culling 2 was a survival battle royale game that was planned to be a bigger and better sequel to the first Culling, which was an early stab at the genre Fortnite and PUBG helped popularize. However, the game was a mess and it didn’t stand out among other similar shooters. So instead of fixing it, the studio behind the game shut it down, removed it from consoles and Steam, and refunded everyone their money. The studio then returned to the OG Culling to improve it. That version of the game was rebooted later and eventually shut down in 2020.