While people love their single-player titles, it’s endlessly enjoyable to hop online and either play with friends or play against them. That’s why some of the most successful titles these days aren’t even single-player with a multiplayer mode, but rather just straightforward online-only titles.
Having said that, the downside to those games is that, eventually, most of them fall apart. At some point, it’s just not worth the money to keep the servers running, and the developer stops running the game. When the player base can’t bring in private servers to allow people to continue playing, that means the game is rendered permanently unplayable.
10 Infinite Crisis Was Shut Down A Year After It Launched
During the time period where MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) games were getting made left and right, Warner Bros Interactive decided it would be a better idea to make a MOBA than give fans what they wanted and make a Superman game. So they made a video game based loosely on the Infinite Crisis comic book and placed it into open beta in March 2014.
This was essentially a soft launch, as they were adding new characters from across the multiverse over time. The game was a solid experience, but it took only a few months after its official launch before they shut the game down in August 2015.
9 WildStar Was A Mega Popular MMO That Was Shut Down By NCSoft Before Its Time
WildStar was developed by Carbine Studios and published by popular MMO developer NCSoft. In the world of WildStar, there was once a powerful alien race known as the Eldan, who were wiped out by a godlike being of their own creation. In their place, humans began to explore the stars until they found their way onto the Eldan homeworld, known as Nexus.
There, the players explore the planet Nexus and discover what secrets lie within the planet. WildStar launched in 2014 and was a fairly popular and beloved game, but it was still shut down in 2018. Currently, players are seeking to revive the game through private servers, even though this is definitely legally sketchy at best.
8 The Sims Online Was Shut Down By EA After It Was Outdone By Competitors
The Sims is one of EA’s most popular franchises that the wider gaming world rarely ever talks about. In 2002, Electronic Arts released Sims Online, which gave Sims fans the opportunity to enjoy the same Sims style but online for $10 a month.
The game enjoyed moderate success once it launched, but after a few years, the title started to languish a bit with lackluster support. This eventually changed when they changed the name of the game to EA-Land, but that didn’t quite get the game to take off the way it needed to either, and in 2008, this title was shut down for good.
7 Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine Was Supported For Nearly A Decade
It was only a matter of time before an Atlus property got its own MMO. In this case, CAVE and Atlus teamed up to release the game in Japan in April 2007. The player becomes a Demon Buster in the SMT world, and it’s his job to battle against demons in a Tokyo that’s been ravaged after a war between humanity and two different groups of demons, lawful and chaotic.
The game relies on some of the classic Shin Megami Tensei elements and takes place at a time between the first two games. The game ran for almost a decade, finally shutting down in 2016.
6 Transformers Online Shut Down In 2020 After Three Years
Transformers Online was published in 2017, though it was originally in development back in 2012 from developer Certain Affinity. The game was a first-person shooter that relied on players working together and controlling a bunch of different Transformers.
They took designs from both the Bayformers universe as well as the popular High Moon Studios’ Cybertron games. The combat felt a lot like Overwatch, and players could be Optimus, Megatron, and several other Transformers in their games. Still, the game was shut down in February of 2020.
5 Marvel Heroes Was Beloved Before Disney Broke Off Ties With Gazillion Entertainment
Marvel Heroes started out nowhere near the favorite it became by the time the game ran its course, but the constant updates helped turn the game around. Originally launched in 2013, it was a free-to-play action RPG that allowed players to control a variety of different characters.
Through the story mode, players could level up their favorite characters and customize them how they wanted. Despite how popular the game became, when Disney broke off their relationship with the company, the writing was on the wall. The game was shut down completely on November 27th, 2017.
4 Star Ocean: Anamnesis Was The Most Money Star Ocean Had Made In Decades
Star Ocean has been running into problems for years. Depending on which Star Ocean fan one speaks to, the last good game was either Star Ocean 2 for the PlayStation or Star Ocean 3 for the PlayStation 2.
But despite how poorly received the fifth game was on the PlayStation 4, the mobile game was actually surprisingly well-received. It received three million downloads in Japan alone within its first month when it released in December 2016. The game would go worldwide in July 2018, but would only survive worldwide for a year before closing down its servers by November 2019. The Japanese servers shut down this June.
3 Super Mario Bros 35 Was Stopped Because Nintendo Only Wanted It To Last A Few Months
Considering its popularity, Super Mario Bros 35 being shut down doesn’t make any sense at all. It was essentially a battle royale platformer styled after Super Mario and meant to celebrate Super Mario‘s 35th anniversary. The game came out on October 1st, 2020, but Nintendo only intended it to exist until April 1st, 2021, when they shut the game down.
This was basically Nintendo’s way of enforcing some false scarcity because when the game was shut down, it was still popular and people were still enjoying it, though it could have used a few tweaks if it had continued to exist.
2 Paragon Stopped Because Epic Realized Fortnite Would Make Them Way More Money
Paragon was one of Epic Games’ last games before they realized Fortnite was going to make them more money than every game they’d made in the last twenty years combined. The game was a third-person MOBA that entered beta testing in August 2016 and never actually released.
The game was canceled in April 2018 before its true release because Epic chose to focus on Fortnite instead. Though the game was canceled, Epic was nice enough to release all the assets of Paragon for people to use for free, including all the characters, skins, and animation, which is why there’s a game using those assets known as Predecessor currently in the works.
1 Asheron’s Call Ran For Nearly Twenty Years Before They Shut The Servers Down
Asheron’s Call is a truly unfortunate story. A fantasy RPG released right around the time of EverQuest, the title was developed by Turbine Entertainment and published by Microsoft. The game had a heady fantasy story that stretched for centuries, with tons of lore for people to dig into to match the complex gameplay.
Nonetheless, fans adored the title, and even nearly two decades later there was a dedicated group of people playing the title when the servers were closed down in 2017. Some players even wanted to buy the IP to keep the game going, but these attempts fell through and, unlike many MMOs which are still going today, this one is currently officially gone.
About The Author
More Stories
Epic Stops Work On ‘Unreal Tournament’ Sequel Because Of ‘Fortnite’
Unreal Tournament 2007 PC Game Download Free Full Version
Championship Game Newport Vs. Gig Harbor