Robot Entertainment is all at once closing down its online games Orcs Must Die! Unchained, Hero Academy, and Hero Academy 2, saying that it’s no longer sustainable to continue to keep the games online and playable.
Both the Hero Academy games released for Android, iOS, and PC while Orcs Must Die! Unchained released for PC and PlayStation 4.
Though unfortunate, it’s not uncommon for developers to close down online servers for games once the cost of keeping them up and running starts to outweigh the money those games bring in. Robot Entertainment offers more details on the specifics of the closure in a post over on its blog, and notes that the three games have already been running at a financial loss for several months.
In the case of the original Hero Academy, Apple’s iOS updates are also partially to blame. Though still playable to those that had previously downloaded it, Hero Academy was removed from the App Store in early 2018 following a series of OS updates from Apple that phased out older and 32-bit iOS apps. That game, according to the developer, has been “technically obsolete for a long time now. We could not maintain the pace of operating system updates from Apple.”
All three of the games will close down fully on April 8 at 10 AM central standard time. At some point in the lead up to that closure, Robot Entertainment will be removing the games from sale and the ability to create new accounts for each, though a set end-date for those features hasn’t been set.
The studio has been scaling down its development efforts for nearly a year now as it looks to focus its efforts on the now two unannounced titles it has in development. In addition to these three server closures, Robot Entertainment laid off 30 team members early last year as par to what it called “strategic shift” to focus on its unreleased project.