Star Wars Hunters announces shutdown less than a year after launch

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The free-to-play, team-based multiplayer game Star Wars Hunters is meeting the same unfortunate fate as Concord, MultiVersus, and Spectre Divide, joining the growing list of live-service titles that failed to stick around. The game is shutting down soon, with its final content update set for April.

From delays to shutdown in just nine months

Star Wars: Hunters was first announced in 2021 and went through several delays before finally launching in June 2024 on Nintendo Switch, Android, and iOS. A PC version was originally planned to hit Steam in Early Access this past January, but it ended up getting scrapped.

Now, barely nine months after launch, the team at Zynga has announced that Star Wars: Hunters will be shutting down on October 1, 2025. The final update will be available for free starting April 15.

The game Star Wars: Hunters faced a challenging start, garnering mixed opinions and receiving only a 40% recommendation on OpenCritic. Contrary to expectations, it managed to earn merely $1 million in its initial month (not counting sales on Switch), lagging significantly behind mobile games such as Squad Busters which made $24 million within the same timeframe.

Turns out the monetization just wasn’t strong enough – cosmetics were either too expensive or unappealing, the battle pass didn’t offer much, and locking heroes behind it hasn’t helped sales. On top of that, updates drop every three months, which is way too slow for a competitive mobile market. Marketing was almost nonexistent, and its high system requirements have limited its reach, especially in mobile-heavy regions. With all these issues, Hunters just struggled to stay afloat.

Doesn’t seem like the best time for Star Wars games. Outlaws didn’t blow us away like we hoped, and while Jedi: Survivor was great, it launched with some major technical issues, especially on PC. On the bright side, at least KOTOR remake isn’t canceled – for now.

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2025-03-17 21:59