An analysis of the situation in the face of a lot of hype for Blizzard's assumed heir to the throne, back when Blizzard were vaguely respected. This got a lot of Reddit Karma and Tumblr Notes, for what that's worth (not bloody much).
So, what happened next?
- Battlefield Heroes shut its servers down later that year. Fan-run servers have risen and fallen over the subsequent years.
- Brink was suddenly, unexpectedly made free to play in 2017. No additional microtransactions, they just removed the price tag on Steam and threw the doors open. It still operates to this day, to an average daily audience of ten people. Splash Damage has continued a long and prosperous career making extremely mid games, and also Gears Tactics, which was pretty good.
- Super MNC kept their servers online until 2018, at which point it was shut down due to an inability to update the long-abandoned game to comply with the GDPR. Developers Uber Entertainment went on to rebrand as Star Theory Games and kept going until 2020, at which point they shut down after losing the contract to develop Kerbal Space Program 2.
- Loadout kept their servers online until 2018 before shutting down due to an inability to update the game (on account of the studio now just being one guy) to comply with the GDPR. The game moved to a paid "Premium Edition" in Asia, which stayed online until 2020 until they simply couldn't afford to keep the servers online.
- Overwatch, much to the surprise of all, did not manage to kill TF2.
- TF2, despite lacking in updates and support in recent years, continues to stay online and active some 15 years on, which is more than some more recent games can do.
- I still haven't figured out how to get Battlefield Heroes (or other pre-Frostbite BF engine games) models into Blender with their rigging intact. Any ideas?
