Guerrilla Games has made an unexpected announcement, which has taken the gaming community by surprise.
After the success of Horizon Forbidden West, Guerrilla Games is on everyone’s lips. The evolution of this development studio is to be applauded. However, not all is joy with respect to the development studio, which is a Sony first-party developer and part of PlayStation Studios.
Guerrilla Games announced today that in less than 31 days, the online servers for Killzone: Mercenary, Killzone: Shadow Fall (including Intercept Mode), and RIGS: Mechanized Combat League will be shut down. Some of them have been running for more than eight years.
A reality that hurts to accept
Since the 2000s, the implementation of online game modes through servers became more popular. Even in 2009, many players were buying titles just for their online game modes. But, as in this life, things have an expiration date. Over the years we have seen that great games have closed their servers.
This decision does not come from the point of view of pissing off the community. Developers make this decision in order to use the maintenance resources of old servers in new game servers. This way, current games can have online server support for another five or six years.
That is why Guerrilla Games has taken the decision to close three of their most popular games of the past decade. Support is ending for Killzone: Mercenary, Killzone Shadow Fall, and RIGS: Mechanized Combat League. In addition, Killzone Shadow Fall will also close the popular Intercept Mode. However, the offline modes of these games will continue to work as usual.
It’s an unexpected decision by Guerrilla Games as Killzone: Shadow Fall is the last game in the Killzone series. In fact, it’s the last game that Guerrilla Games released before dedicating itself exclusively to the Horizon saga. Thanks to this, Shadow Fall had an important player base despite having been released in 2013 for the PS4.
The 90-day announcement window was not respected
Because of this, the communities of these games did not even last five minutes to respond to the announcement. Not only did they demonstrate in the face of the sad news, it turns out that many of them have expressed their dissatisfaction with the server closure date.
Usually, in the video game industry, there is something called the 90-day rule. This means that whenever server closures, online stores are announced, or games are removed from stores, a 90-day window is respected from the announcement to the final date. When it was announced that the online servers would be closed on August 12, there would only be a 21-day window.
Users like CaffeinatedBolt, JorgeSleep, and Zenkoto_ responded to Guerrilla’s tweet expressing their annoyance at this announcement with so few weeks until the closure. But the most important response to Guerrilla Games’ tweet came from user griftForceOne. He shared an image showing the terms of service and user agreement for Killzone: Mercenary, the PS Vita game. In the image, you can see a paragraph mentioning the 90 days policy.
Despite complaints from the community, the Guerrilla Games team has not responded to these messages. Unless Guerrilla delays the closure, we only have 21 days to unlock any trophies. So if you haven’t done it and want to do it, now is the time!
