Dead Island: Epidemic is Shutting Down October 15th

Dead Island: Epidemic is a fairly-well received MOBA which adopted Valve’s Early Access programme. Unfortunately, the developer after a great deal of deliberation, has decided to cancel the game and close all remaining servers on October 15th. The team announced the news in a Steam Community post and said:

“Dear players,

Ever since starting with the Closed Alpha, and all the way through the Closed Beta and Open Beta, we’ve received a great amount of useful criticism and encouraging feedback from our players. This has been invaluable for all the teams involved in developing the game.

Over the past weeks and months we’ve been evaluating how to proceed with Dead Island: Epidemic and looking towards the future for the game. We’re sad to announce today that we’ve come to the conclusion to cease further development.

We will be leaving the servers open until the end of October 15th (Pacific Time), during which time we’ll run a very large discount on all characters and boosts to give everyone a chance to spend any remaining currency on characters and items you may have wanted to try before, but never did.

We want to thank everyone for their support, their feedback, and their time playing Dead Island: Epidemic! The game would not have been the same without you.

Signed,
Team Dead Island: Epidemic”

This is extremely disappointing and reiterates how perilous it can be to purchase games in such an early development stage. Thankfully, this particular case utilized the free-to-play business model, but customers who made various micro-payments will be rightfully upset. It’s always a shame to see any game fail and especially a PC-exclusive title. Also, this is the major problem with multiplayer-only games as the servers can be switched off in the future and render any title completely useless. That’s why I’ll always prefer a narrative-drive single player experience.