The journey of the melee-based battle royale might end sooner than expected.
According to a tweet by gaming journalist Tom Henderson, Epic Games considers shutting down Rumbleverse servers as soon as February 2023. There is no official announcement yet, but Henderson tends to be reliable, and he claims that Epic Games has started de-listing the game with an eye towards making an announcement soon.
Rumbleverse was launched back in August 2022 as a free-to-play action Battle Royale game, but instead of becoming a shooter, the game instead focused on a melee-based combat system. Rumbleverse has received two seasons of post-launch content so far, with the second season coming in November 2022. In a world where the game isn’t shutting down, we’d be waiting for news on the third season right about now.
Rumbleverse was developed by Iron Galaxy, the same team that worked on the second and third seasons of Microsoft’s Killer Instinct. Prior to Rumbleverse, the team worked on a third-person action game called Extinction, which received unfavourable reviews following its launch in 2018. Despite the fact that Rumbleverse was backed by Epic Games, Iron Galaxy still remains an indie developer. Besides PC, the game is also available on current-gen and last-gen consoles of PlayStation and Xbox.
Though Epic has a strong history of marketing its collection of free-to-play multiplayer games, Rumbleverse failed to gain traction. Although we don’t have any official data on the number of online players for Rumbleverse, the game ranked low on cumulative Twitch viewers just a few weeks after its official launch.
Although Iron Galaxy has developed quite a few of its own games, the studio primarily works with developers to support the development of other games. Recently, Iron Galaxy helped Naughty Dog deliver the PC version of Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection.
