PlanetSide Arena is Being Shut Down

If you didn’t remember – and I can’t blame you if you didn’t – Daybreak Games is kind of struggling. Over the past few years, they’ve had two waves of layoffs, and many of their games are currently struggling to survive. But while some of their games, like Planetside 2, continue to putter and struggle along, others -- specifically Planetside Arena, which is their attempt at making a Battle Royale game – aren’t so lucky.

Because after a mere eighteen months on the market, Planetside Arena is shutting down early next year.

After careful consideration, we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down PlanetSide Arena servers.

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.

As a result, PlanetSide Arena will formally shut down servers on January 10th, 2020 at 5:00 PM (PST). We are actively working with Steam to ensure that all players who made purchases during Early Access will automatically receive a full refund to their Steam Wallet after servers shut down in January.

Planetside Arena was ambitious, to say the least, offering enormous battles that dwarfed the competition in terms of sheer scale. But it just didn’t grab users, as the number of active players is currently quite low (sitting at single digits) and was actually never that large to begin with.

Either way, this closure, combined with the recent layoffs, speaks ill of Planetside 3, which DayBreak has been promising for quite a while now. There’s been no news of any additional layoffs, but it’s rare to see a studio bleed out this much and manage to stagger its way to a new release. Case in point: Boss Keys.

But we’ll see.