Online-only live-service co-op game King of Meat launched last fall. About four months later, the game announced that its servers would be shutting off in April. This has become a very familiar story in the game industry.<\/p>\n
King of Meat<\/a> launched on October 31, 2025, and cost $30. In the lead-up to the launch of the Amazon-published game, it got a flashy (and likely very expensive) animated trailer<\/a> at Gamescom Opening Night Live in August 2024. There was even a (also likely expensive) promotional video from MrBeast featuring content creators playing King of Meat in a big tournament. Reportedly, leadership at Glowmade, the studio behind the game, was aiming for around 100,000 concurrent players on Steam at launch. It never exceeded more than 400<\/a> according to SteamDB and never cracked 1,000 across consoles and PC. Shocking nobody, layoffs were planned in late December. Now, the game is shutting down.<\/p>\n On February 23,\u00a0 Amazon announced<\/a> that King of Meat\u2018s servers will shut off for good on April 9, 2026 in a post titled \u201cThe Future of King of Meat.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDespite the creativity and innovation Glowmade brought to King of Meat, the game has unfortunately not found the audience we hoped for,\u201d said the post. \u201cAs a result, we have made the difficult decision to conclude our investment in the game, and King of Meat\u2019s servers will close on April 9, 2026. Players will be able to access and play all existing content until then, so we encourage you to enjoy your remaining time in the game with your fellow Contenders.\u201d<\/p>\n All players who purchased King of Meat will receive a full refund \u201cin the coming weeks,\u201d according to the post announcing the game\u2019s demise.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want to sincerely thank every player who supported King of Meat and the wonderful community that formed around it,\u201d said Amazon. \u201cYour enthusiasm, imagination, and feedback have meant the world to us and to the team at Glowmade. We\u2019re grateful for Glowmade\u2019s partnership and passion throughout this journey and wish them continued success in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n Stop trying to force people to play more live-service games <\/p>\n This is far from the first live-service game that\u2019s announced a shutdown over the last few years. In fact, the odds are high that if a studio launches an online-only live-service game, it will be dead in about a year or less nowadays. We famously saw that with Concord in 2024,<\/a> which was such a disastrous launch that it died in less than two weeks and torpedoed Sony\u2019s ongoing live-service game efforts, likely leading to canceled projects and studio closures as PlayStation reevaluated its strategy. It hasn\u2019t given up entirely, though.<\/a><\/p>\n But Sony isn\u2019t alone in its desperate, messy push for forever games that can print money<\/a>. Amazon is shutting down its once-popular MMO New World, and before that, killed online shooter Crucible, a game that I can almost bet nobody remembers in 2026<\/a>. You could make a pretty long list of all the live-service and other online games that have died in recent years. Actually, we have done that.<\/a> It just keeps happening. And yet, publishers keep investing a lot of money and resources into chasing Fortnite and other live-service hits, despite being surrounded by a graveyard of past attempts. And the few big winners there are these days came out years ago, and everyone is still playing them.<\/a><\/p>\n Hopefully, the folks at Glowmade can bounce back, along with all other affected devs, and the industry stops trying to make 500 more live-service games nobody clearly wants. Yes, Helldivers 2 succeeded. There are rare exceptions, sure. But odds are your in-development live-service project won\u2019t be so lucky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Online-only live-service co-op game King of Meat launched last fall. About four months later, the game announced that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":495256,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[198729,49,48,198730,61],"class_list":["post-495255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-amazon-game-studios","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-king-of-meat","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=495255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495255\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/495256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=495255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=495255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=495255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}