Daybreak Games has announced that it will be shutting down the servers for PlanetSide Arena on January 10th, 2020. Just a couple months after it got started in Early Access no less. According to the announcement, the game just didn’t have the volume of players it needed to keep going. The game just couldn’t get players interested , especially with all the problems the PlanetSide community has highlighted over the years.
Developers have tried to keep PlanetSide 2 going, with new content even new continents entirely. But long-term issues with the lack of variety across factions and the consistent destruction of game balance has pushed people away. For PlanetSide Arena though it never really got off of the ground. The game attempted to cash in on the hype surrounding the battle royale genre way too late, and fans rightly pointed out the state that the game was in just wasn’t fun.
As Daybreak stated:
“While our team set out with an ambitious vision for a game that combined the massive-scale combat and camaraderie of PlanetSide through a diverse collection of new game modes, it has become clear after several months in Early Access that our population levels make it impossible to sustain the gameplay experience we envisioned.”
Let that be a lesson kids, chasing trends rarely works out for you in the games industry. It’s all but doomed to failure when you’re a game company trying to push a trend-chasing title when previous games are still suffering fundamental problems. And if your solution to those problems is to just release new version of the same game, there’s not much good fortune headed your way.
This isn’t the first time Daybreak has run into this problem either. The company had to cancel the highly-anticipated Everquest Next due to a variety of issues, shortly after it first entered a playable state.
