Despite promising that servers won't shutdown, Babylon's Fall is, in fact, shutting servers down

PlatinumGames has announced this morning that development will not continue on Babylon's Fall, and that the game's live services are being terminated. This also means, given that Babylon's Fall is an online-only game, that no one will be able to play it once servers are shutdown.

The developer announced February 27, 2023 as the last day anyone will be able to play the online action RPG, meaning Babylon's Fall will have lasted less than a year since its release in March this year.

"With the desire of delivering an exhilarating online multiplayer action RPG set in an elaborate high fantasy world, we launched the game’s official service on Thursday, March 3, 2022, and have continued to undertake additional development and operations," said PlatinumGames in an official statement.

"However, it is with deep regret to inform you that we will be terminating the game’s service on February 27, 2023."

This also means that any major updates that were once in development are no longer being worked on, and will not be released. The developer also posted an updated calendar showing what to expect over these final months. Season 2 will run until November 29, and the final season will kick off later that same day following server maintenance.

Said final season will see the game through to its end, but players will also be able to earn Season 2 rewards during it. This, obviously, is practically pointless since whatever content earned will disappear after servers are turned off.

"As a way of expressing our gratitude to all our players, we plan to implement as many events and other initiatives as we can, leading up to the end of the service," the developer added.

Babylon's Fall is largely considered one of the worst games of the year, and has underperformed so badly that PlatinumGames had to come out shortly after launch and specifically reassure players that the live service is not in danger.

The game launched on PC, PS4 and PS5 as a full-priced product with free-to-play elements. Though sales and player numbers were not shared, the game had a single active player on Steam as recently as May.

In hindsight, it's not that much of a surprise that Babylon's Fall is being canned so soon after release. Even before players could get their hands on it, complaints about the game's art style and visuals were loud enough that Platinum made some adjustments between closed betas and launch.

As unfortunate as it is, this is yet another case of Square Enix fumbling a live service game, which only adds to player distrust about projects of the same ilk coming from the Japanese publisher in the future.