I’m sorry to report this afternoon that the long-running siege PvP MMORPG Gloria Victis is sunsetting. Polish indie studio Black Eye Games made the announcement on Steam, telling players that not only is the game closing but so is the studio itself.
“This marks the end of a decade-long history that started in February 2012. It was an awesome journey that took a big part of our lives,” Black Eye says. “We can proudly say that we managed to run the servers of our game continuously for almost 11 years, and since the Steam release in 2016 we updated the game more than 370 times (plus 150 times before Steam).”
The rationale is unfortunately predictable: It’s down to a lack of players and money.
“Mostly due to financial reasons, as our game has always been a niche which we found extremely hard to expand without losing the game’s identity, and required more and more resources to progress and keep the pace, and due to continuous work without required rest for so long which eventually led to burnouts, we won’t be able to provide required maintenance on the game much longer,” the company explains. The game did see a surge of players earlier this year when it officially launched out of early access, but it settled back down to under a thousand or so peak players as it’s seen throughout the COVID era.
The company says it’ll run one more season before shutting the game down on Halloween – October 31st, 2023. It also says that turning the game over to the community is off the table.
“Due to our game being fully MMORPG, it has a very wide and spread infrastructure, which basically means it has no chance to be hosted via Community which would be the best outcome of such a situation. We studied all potential scenarios and sadly, it would be impossible to create a version that would not require excessive infrastructure to host player-made servers.”
Our condolences to the players and the staff.
