We’re the bearer of more bad news today: Tencent is closing down its looter-shooter Synced.
Synced was a sci-fi co-op looter shooter from Tencent’s Level Infinite and NExT Studios; it hit open beta here in the west at the tail end of 2022, then sauntered over to PC on September 11th of 2023. And then? Well, it fell off our radar entirely, though it did have a little bit of updating; it saw its first season in December, its Chinese launch in January, and then its second season in March. But the Steam page hasn’t been updated since then, and a quick look at SteamCharts shows the PC version of the game has been dead for a while; it peaked at 10K players at launch but hasn’t crested 500 players since Christmas, and there are 17 people in there as I type this.
Anyway, that explains why Tencent has announced the game’s sunset on September 9th, just two days shy of its first birthday. “Synced will be terminated with effect from 11:00 on September 9, 2024,” the company says. While you can still play, you can’t register new accounts or buy anything in the game with real money, so if you didn’t already have an account, you never will. No specific reason for the shutdown is offered, though it’s not hard to guess, and reviews were sitting at mixed before the announcement.
For those curious about how it played, MOP’s Chris tried out Synced last year during its open beta.
