America’s Army: Proving Grounds, the official free-to-play FPS of the US Army, has announced that it will close up shop after eight years. For those who are unfamiliar, the Proving Grounds version of the shooter first launched in October 2015, while the game series itself has run for 20 years over three different iterations, and was intended to both portray real-life US Army fireteam operations and recruit interested players into service. The series drew in 20 million players overall.
The initial announcement confirmed that the official servers will go dark on Thursday, May 5th, on both PC and PS4, while a follow-up post hinted that the team is “[looking] forward to what the future could hold for AA,” and encourages players “to stay tuned for future announcements on the series.”
The AA devs are still leveraging gaming tech for soldier training and public education, including a training simulator to replicate battlefield triage and educational mobile apps that let players explore chemistry and the human skeleton. As far as AA is concerned, however, it’s “mission accomplished” in its own words.
