STEEL HUNTERS is another live service casualty as it's shutting down

Might have been an issue with marketing tbh - never heard of it before but would surely have given it a go looking at the Steam page (if it still had a future that is...)

I'm not always up on the latest and greatest video game these days, but I don't recall hearing hide nor hair about this game at all. Not that I would have played it, personally, but still...

I will be one of those guys and say, if they built their game around self hosted servers (like, say, Dune Awakening to take a recent example), then maybe the game would have lasted substantially longer.

Ah well, tough break.

@ObsidianBlk, bad example with Dune as it doesn't actually allow for selfhosted server AFAIK. You need to go through a certified hosting company as the game need a central hub server that can only be hosted by them. So if companies decide that it's not worth offering it anymore it will die if they don't open the central hub server hosting to everyone.

But back to the article, never heard of this game even tho it looks interesting, maybe they didn't had a big marketing budget?

Another reason why Stop Killing Games is a good initiative.

Another reason why Stop Killing Games is a good initiative.

I'd say this needs a "Stop creating badly thought out live service games and use the talent for better projects" initiative.

Another day, another Temporary Service game dead.

One down, shitload to go.

Live service games are either a huge success, like Fortnite, or a financial disaster, like every other game that isn't Fortnite. There is no in-between.


Last edited by Mountain Man on 9 Jul 2025 at 3:46 pm UTC

@Thibug ... That is a fair point. I didn't fully realize that when I made my statement.

That said, I still feel it's a decent example of keeping the game going longer than if the servers were kept completely in-house. As it stands, if/when the game looses over-all popularity and the official servers close, there is a greater likelihood that 3rd party providers will be allowed to keep offering private servers for existing (and potential future) players. Additionally, given that a large chunk of the underlying server code is already in the hands of third parties, it also means there's a greater likelihood that, upon shutdown, the remaining server portions (the cities and, likely, auction houses... not sure, never got that far) could also be released (giving a pathway similar to what the SKG initiative is asking for).

Is the Dune Awakening service model perfect? No. It would have been better if users were allowed to setup a private server on their own without needing to subscribe to a third party (that is to say, more in line with games like Valheim, 7 Days to Die, Minecraft, etc, etc), but, again, it's leagues better than watching another potentially fun, yet multiplayer-focused, game die because the game itself lives totally on the publishers servers.

Once upon a time there was this thing called peer-to-peer and peer-to-server and people could host a game server on their own machine no problems. Crazy ha!