So many online games have been closed so far in 2023 that we already had to make a collectionand it is alone February. Which means many more will meet a similar fate in the next 10 months and the next two to meet their demise are Natural Selection 2 and Spell.
Its developers Natural Selection 2, which has been in business for 10 years, announced earlier today that it will stop “active development” of the game, but won’t shut down completely. Instead, while they move on to other projects, they will leave the lights on (emphasis mine):
10 years since its official release and over 117 updates later, active development of Natural Selection 2 has ended.
Our team and this community have provided many years of passion and support for this game. Over the years we’ve had the opportunity to meet and work with so many of you either at the show, live tournaments, Discord or playing on a server. Thank you for your support and commitment to NS2 and we know this game wouldn’t be the same without you. Now it is time to look to the future and continue with other projects within the company.
Although we will not be actively working on NS2, we will continue to host mapped game servers so that community members can play on-demand games with other players or bots.
While this isn’t goodbye, we’d still like to say a very sincere thank you to you, our community, and everyone who’s worked with us on Natural Selection 2 over the years.
Much love and appreciation,
The UWE NS2 team
While it’s always sad for fans when a game ends this way, many of them just want to be able to keep playing the thing, so it’s nice to see the Unknown Worlds developers leaving some servers for the world to enjoy .
Concerning Spell, We knew its end was coming as early as June 2022, but it finally came today, with the game being removed from Steam. That’s the bad news, though. the good news is that the game will continue and so will the developers “created a standalone version where players can host their own servers, play with their friends and explore the game space at their own pace.”
That’s wonderful! This is even better than leaving some servers open, because as John Carmack said last week, is the absolute best case scenario for ending official support for an online game. By releasing the game to the winds and freeing it from the constraints of stores and online platforms, fans can continue to play it for as long as there are fans and even when there are no more, the game can be preserved for future generations.