Atlas Reactor Shutting Down In June

When Trion Worlds' games were sold to gamigo back in November, we noted the semi-puzzling absence of one if its titles in the official press release announcing the sale. Atlas Reactor wasn't mentioned alongside Rift, ArcheAge, Trove, and Defiance, and while its omission may have been a mistake, it didn't take much digging to see that the game wasn't performing too well. On the F2P Cast, we speculated that it had a low chance of survival -- and today, we were proven right.

gamigo announced today that sales in the Atlas Reactor cash shop have been disabled, and the game will be going offline June 28. XP, Flux, and ISO rates have been turned up, and players who logged in between the start of the year and yesterday, April 16, will receive an additional gift, to be specified at a later date. Former Executive Producer Mervin Lee Kwai said that the game "broke the mold of same-y games" but "never grew big enough to fund its continued development."

In case you forgot, Atlas Reactor was originally announced as a free-to-play game and launched into a paid early access period. Then Trion Worlds declared that it would be a buy-to-play game, with CEO Scott Hartsman insisting it wasn't a "niche" title. A few months after that, it shifted back to offering a free-to-play option, though with a model I found lacking, before changing gears yet again to a more palatable F2P model.

Kwai was right, in saying that Atlas Reactor doesn't play like anything else out there. That's not a bad thing to try, and -- Roborally fan that I am -- I enjoyed some aspects of it. But the execution and financial decisions behind it soured me, and likely others, on the game. While it's gamigo that's officially shutting down the game, it's reasonable to think that its lack of sustainability would have doomed it even if it stayed with Trion Worlds.