Kabam's Star Wars: Uprising has been pulled from the App Store, and a notice sent to players that the game is being shut down. This follows Spirit Lords getting shut down, which was basically the same core game, just Uprising added in a Star Wars theme. The game will be officially shut down on November 17th:
If you play , the game will be shutting down on 11/17/16. Just got this message when I logged in.
— Coffee With Kenobi (@CoffeeWthKenobi)
For Star Wars fans, this is sad because the game's story actually was canon and took place between the first two movie trilogies. And the game overall was a solid free-to-play action-RPG – and I recall the Spirit Lords developers making a big stink about trying to be a fair free-to-play game. Perhaps that's the big drawback of trying to do anything in free-to-play that might comfort non-spenders: it might convince payers to not do so, either. And it's not like it's impossible to make an RPG with Star Wars that does well: Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes [] does really well for EA.
The worrying thing for Kabam might be that their business is pretty much centered around Marvel Contest of Champions []. Their other global game is Fast and Furious: Legacy [] and that's not exactly lighting up the charts, though it's doing better than Uprising was. Maybe the game's doing really well with advertising dollars, but still, there's one unqualified hit in Kabam's portfolio, and nothing else. They have a game called , so we'll see if that's a title worth paying attention to in the future. But still, this seems a bit worrying for Kabam that even with a massive license, they couldn't make it work. And again, for players that get invested in free-to-play games, it stinks because if the game shuts down because not enough people are spending money on it, well, poof.
If you play , the game will be shutting down on 11/17/16. Just got this message when I logged in.
— Coffee With Kenobi (@CoffeeWthKenobi)
For Star Wars fans, this is sad because the game's story actually was canon and took place between the first two movie trilogies. And the game overall was a solid free-to-play action-RPG – and I recall the Spirit Lords developers making a big stink about trying to be a fair free-to-play game. Perhaps that's the big drawback of trying to do anything in free-to-play that might comfort non-spenders: it might convince payers to not do so, either. And it's not like it's impossible to make an RPG with Star Wars that does well: Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes [] does really well for EA.
The worrying thing for Kabam might be that their business is pretty much centered around Marvel Contest of Champions []. Their other global game is Fast and Furious: Legacy [] and that's not exactly lighting up the charts, though it's doing better than Uprising was. Maybe the game's doing really well with advertising dollars, but still, there's one unqualified hit in Kabam's portfolio, and nothing else. They have a game called , so we'll see if that's a title worth paying attention to in the future. But still, this seems a bit worrying for Kabam that even with a massive license, they couldn't make it work. And again, for players that get invested in free-to-play games, it stinks because if the game shuts down because not enough people are spending money on it, well, poof.