MOBA “15 Years In The Making” Shuts Down Before Leaving Early Access

A multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game, in development for fifteen years, has been cancelled. It launched into early access in May 2025 and received generally positive reviews on Steam, but ultimately failed to progress beyond that stage. The developer, Lunchbox Entertainment, stated that despite their team’s hard work, they were unable to continue development.

I was really excited about Sirocco, even though it wasn’t super well-known. It’s a 5v5 naval combat game where you build up your own boat and try to sink other players – kind of like Battleship meets a MOBA. It actually started as a mod for Warcraft 3 over ten years ago, which is pretty cool! Sadly, it never really took off. It peaked at around 882 players a few months back, but now it’s struggling to get even 30 players online. So, the developers, Lunchbox Entertainment, have decided to shut down the servers. It’s a shame, I was hoping it would catch on!

The team announced on Steam that the game’s servers will be permanently shut down on August 20, 2025, at 3 PM Eastern Time. After this date, the game will no longer be playable. They apologized for any inconvenience and thanked players for their support, directing anyone with questions to their Discord server where they’ll offer assistance.

On August 18th, Jack of Boxes, a developer for Sirocco, shared on the game’s official Discord server that the team is proud of their work and wants to revive the game.

It’s with a lot of sadness that we’re announcing Sirocco is shutting down. Despite our efforts, we can’t continue running the servers, and they will be turned off on Wednesday, the 20th – that’s in just two days. We’ve already refunded all Patreon supporters who subscribed within the last 90 days. We’re incredibly proud of Sirocco and hope to bring it back someday when we have more resources, and we’ll keep making games to work towards that goal. Thank you to our amazing community – you’ve all been fantastic, and we couldn’t have asked for better support!

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2025-09-26 19:09