Spellbreak Development Ends, Server Shutdown Announced

By Tanner Dedmon

Spellbreak, the magic-focused battle royale from Proletariat, Inc. where players fling spells at one another, is shutting down in 2023. The game's creators announced this development – or rather the end of development – this week on social media alongside a post on the game's site that elaborated on the details of Spellbreak's final period of playability. No specific shutdown date for the game's servers has been announced at this time, but Proletariat confirmed already that the development on the game has indeed ended.

The game first launched for the PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC platforms in September 2020, though it was playable prior to that through alpha and beta tests that dated back to 2018. A post on the game's site talking about future plans for the game recounted the team's vision for the project and called it an "ambitious" game.

"Our vision was to create a fresh, multiplayer action-spellcasting game with exceptional movement and class customization that would give players the chance to unleash their inner battlemage," the Spellbreak team said. "We are grateful to everyone in the game's community for exploring the magical worlds and experiences we created together. Spellbreak was an ambitious project that saw our team push new boundaries in design and development and we are excited to continue to innovate as we create new titles in the future."

While the game seems to have received generally favorable reviews from players, its updates have been sporadic at best over the past couple of months. The site shows that it got Patch 4.1 back in September 2021 with the one before that released two months prior in July. Seth Sivak, the CEO of Proletariat, shared a message within the game's subreddit saying that Spellbreak was never able to reach a point where the team could sustainably invest in it.

"Unfortunately, the game industry is a difficult business. Spellbreak was not able to break through and reach a sustainable place where we could continue to invest in it in the way we had dreamed of," Sivak said. "We picked a hard path as an independent studio and decided to compete with some of the biggest games in the world. While we could not get the escape velocity needed, I do not regret the bold decisions we made in bringing Spellbreak to life."

Comments following that statement lamented the fact that communications were nonexistent for lengthy periods of time up until this announcement, so it seems not everyone in the community is taking the shutdown news as well as others.

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