I left Overwatch when Overwatch 1 servers were turned off and found a fun replacement in Paladins playing it for a couple of years. What finally drove me away from Paladins was the broken rewards. You could be working toward one of the rewards and you effort simply didn’t count for that match/game/day. Your progress meter was the same at the beginning as the end of your play time with zero progress. Sometime they’d fix it, many times it would be. When you can do the work and the progress doesn’t count it removes any incentive to work for the rewards.

I’ll still log every now and then to play the game and enjoy it. Except now I simply ignore any of the offered rewards and play the game only for the gameplay value, so I play it much much less.

Hi-Rez is the king of creating a new game, pretending it’s their “big thing” and then enshittifying it while their good devs are moved to the next “big thing.” They are fad chasers who are constantly in a race to monetize a market and then move on.

I’m glad it caught up with them. Couldn’t have happened to a better company. Apologies to the earnest designers and programmers that got caught in the crossfire.

The article makes it sound like it’s just about the “older” games, but layoffs affect core smite 2 development, too. And not just 1 or 2 people either. Also literally everyone related to eSports, so that entire concept seems dead to them as well. Kinda looks like we’re on a downward spiral, so don’t get too invested.

Of all their games I easily have 800+ hours in Rogue Company and saw the writing on the wall after a year of no additional content and the same Christmas theme year-round. I stopped playing 6 months ago because I didn’t want to invest in more time in a game that wasn’t being supported and could be shut down any time.

I guess the good news is the servers will be up, but who is going to play now?