I’m sorry to report this afternoon that Phoenix Labs’ Dauntless is closing down.
The sunset news came in the form of a brief tweet this afternoon. “Dauntless is shutting down on May 29, 2025. Dauntless will receive no additional content or updates,” the message reads. “Dauntless will no longer be available to play on and after May 29, 2025 at 11:45PM PST.” An identical message was posted to Steam. There’s nothing at all on the official site and no other information from the dev team.
And that’s probably because there is no dev team, not anymore. As readers will hopefully recall, just a few weeks ago, Phoenix Labs laid off the vast majority of the Dauntless and Fae Farm teams “as part of unfortunate but necessary changes to [its] operations” with the promise that it would “share more details in the coming weeks about what this means” for the two remaining games. As we noted at the time, game cancelations and layoffs had already been ongoing at Phoenix Labs since 2023 following a supposed investor buyout that turned out to have been an acquisition of PL by a dodgy blockchain company, Forte Labs.
Dauntless in particular had survived initial cuts but struggled after the Awakening revamp went south; even our own Dauntless expert said the game “barely registers as a husk of its former self, drained by what can only be assumed is a desperate final cash-out attempt before the whole house of cards finally tumbles over.” That whispery sound you hear is the cards hitting the ground now.
The Fae Farm Twitter account and Steam page don’t mention anything about impacts on the game, but it was a standalone co-op title. We assume it will also get no further development.
Our sympathies to the developers, again, and to the loyal players who didn’t deserve any of this dumpster fire.
