Nosgoth Cancelled, Will Shut Down May 31

Square Enix has announced that its free-to-play Legacy of Kain-inspired humans vs. vampires slugfest Nosgoth will shut down at the end of next month. It's the second SE-published game to shut its doors this year before even getting out of beta, following Triad Wars.

In a post on the Nosgoth forums, EU Community Manager Oghamsmith gave a shoutout to the dedicated team that brought Nosgoth into being and thanked the players for their continued support. The reason given for the shutdown was simply lack of players: "ultimately its audience hasn’t grown enough to sustain ongoing operations."

The game will continue to operate until May 31, and the forums will remain open until June 14. No real-money purchases can be made in that time. If you made a purchase since March 1, it will be refunded. Finally, for you Legacy of Kain fans who wanted a more RPG-like experience and might be worried that Nosgoth's failure will have a negative bearing on that, SE has this to say:

"Any future Legacy of Kain project will be considered independently of Nosgoth and on the merits of the proposals alone."

As someone who played a fair bit of Nosgoth, I can't say I disagree with the reasons given. Player population was severely lacking, even during prime time hours, and it would sometimes take a ridiculously long time to find a match. I think the huge number of levels and the lobby system didn't do the game any favors in that regard, either, and though I never encountered anything severe, a lot of complaints in the forum thread are about unfixed bugs. There are a couple of other games out there -- good, solid games -- that might be suffering from the same fate. It's probably a topic for a future editorial.

For now, though, I'll just mourn the loss of an underrated game that was more fun than I thought it would be when I first heard of its idea of asymmetric gameplay. I'm not a high-level player, so I won't pretend to know how the balance was between vampires and humans, though the Square Enix and Psyonix team did seem to adjust nicely to the early advantage vampires had. I'll be sad to see it go, and I wonder what effect this could have on Square Enix's overall willingness to stick around in the PC F2P gaming space.