Do you remember Rocket Arena? It was a 3v3 arena shooter all about firing rockets at one another (surprise), though it was less about blowing people apart and more about building up enough damage that a final rocket blast would fling foes off of a platform a la Super Smash Bros. The game released in 2020 and appeared to garner some generally favorable reviews from both critics and players.
We bring this one up because news began circulating of the title quietly being removed from digital storefronts by publisher Electronic Arts, and sure enough, it was pulled from EA Play subscribers last week and was similarly made unavailable on Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox, without any formal announcement from EA or developer Final Strike Games.
Tracing back the game’s update history, we can see that Final Strike itself effectively stopped supporting Rocket Arena: The shooter received a quality-of-life update in September 2021 and otherwise was running double XP weekends as recently as last April. Meanwhile, Final Strike claimed work on an unannounced game on its official site, but that project was reportedly axed by Sony this past May, when 40% of the studio was laid off.
Despite all of this sad news, Rocket Arena is still playable by those who own the shooter according to chatter in Discord, with players still discussing ways to play the game as recently as this past weekend. However, many are bracing for EA’s eventual shutdown of the game’s servers despite claims to the contrary from an EA support staffer, who said that the servers will remain online “for now” and players can enjoy the shooter “without any issues for years” – a response that received an understandable level of skepticism given the publisher’s history.
All told, the shooter still lives, but only barely, and it appears to be on assumed borrowed time as publisher and studio both look to have walked away.
