Although we now have a solid selection of competitive games to play, our options could be much broader if all the competitive games stayed alive in recent years. The truth is gaming market is quite tight when it comes to the competitive genre, as there are always some giant games likeFortnite,Counter-Strike 2, orLeague of Legendsthat absorb the majority of players.
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As you can guess, it is quite a risky move to invest in a competitive game without having good knowledge of what your competitors are doing and what your community would love to receive. A mistake at either end of this process punishes developers harshly, leaving them no choice other than shutting down their games and giving up.
10Knockout City
Take A Break From Weapons!
As a reimagination of dodgeball in a futuristic environment,Knockout Citywas released as an indie project funded byElectronic Artsback in 2021. Featuring a handful of maps and modes at launch, Knockout City was a multiplayer playground with a simple rule: Hit the enemies with the ball and knock them out of the match.
Although Knockout City received almost two years of support from the development team with content updates and was nominated for theBest Multiplayer Gameat The Game Awards 2021, the significant drop in player count seemed inevitable. Even launching the game on EA Play and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate services only two months after launch didn’t help Knockout City survive longer, resulting in a server shutdown back in June 2023.
Knockout City
9Nine To Five
A Tactical Leap Held Back By Greed
Revealed with quite an interesting trailer in The Game Awards 2019, Nine To Five seemed like a long-awaited competitor to Ubisoft’sRainbow Six Siegeback then with similar tactical approaches. While the game was available in the Early Access phase on Steam with two maps and a handful of guns and modes, it took the developers longer than enough to deliver 1.0.
When the final version arrived, most Nine To Five players had already left the game for good. Despite featuring good tactical depth in a 3v3v3 environment, Nine To Five was a victim of bad design choices and a weird progression system that locked weapons and gears behind a hard grind, only allowing those who spend real money to gain access to those weapons easily. Other than that, the game also suffered from a flawed matchmaking system with tons of errors. Nine To Five is not officially dead, but it had only a peak of 4 concurrent players on Steam over the last year, without receiving any new updates for a long time.
Nine to Five
8Spellbreak
Spells In, Bullets Out!
When theBattle Royaletrend was almost at its peak, Spellbreak arrived with a brand-new idea to bring a fresh taste to the genre. While the overall rules of the Battle Royale gameplay were identical to other competitors, Spellbreak emphasized delivering a unique gunplay system where guns and bullets are replaced by spell casting.
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As a class-based third-person shooter, each player starts the game with a gauntlet of their own class, which could have been upgraded or changed by killing and looting the other players in the PvP arena. While Spellbreak featured refreshing and enjoyable gameplay, the game lacked a strong pipeline of content, which put it far behind the dominating kings of Battle Royale at the time, likeApex Legendsor Fortnite. Other than that, the game was exclusive to the Epic Games Store on PC at its launch despite being a free-to-play experience, which further affected the player count. Spellbreak servers were shut down earlier in January 2023 following the development studio’s acquisition byActivision-Blizzardin 2022.
Spellbreak
Dying In The Peak
If you have been a mobile gamer for a long time, there is a good chance you will remember QuizUp. Before it shut down, QuizUp used to be the biggest PvP trivia game on mobile, covering a massive amount of topics and categories. From sports and entertainment to politics, there was a wide variety of fields to choose from, and compete in real-time trivia matches with other online players to prove your skills and knowledge.
Even now, we don’t have anything close to QuizUp on mobile with such a massive player base. The game’s rules were simple: Pick up a topic, wait for the matchmaking, and start answering 10 questions in 100 seconds. At the end of the match, the player with the most correct answers would win. The real-time nature of QuizUp added significantly to its competitiveness and tension. Unfortunately, QuizUp became a victim of financial mistakes. The original developer of the game was forced to sell the app to Glu Mobile back in 2016 after laying off all its employees. The game then lived for 5 more years, until Glu Mobile itself was acquired by Electronic Arts in 2021, and one month before the deal closed, QuizUp officially died.
6Hyper Scape
Hackers' Battle Royale!
Ubisoft attempted to deliver a Battle Royale experience multiple times, but the only title that saw the light of day wasHyper Scape. As a first-person shooter, Hyper Scape took all the standard systems of a Battle Royale game and modified them to deliver a fresh experience. For example, the game featured a Hack system that would give players some special skills to help them avoid shrinking zones and reposition faster and safer in the game’s world. There was also an AI match moderator that could add new events to the match, such as enabling a Low Gravity mode, either randomly or based on the votes received from viewers on Twitch.
Despite all its innovations, Hyper Scape could not compete with games likeWarzone, Fortnite, Apex Legends, or PUBG. It was only a few months after its massive launch that the player count dropped significantly, and the developer announced an upcoming overhaul for the gameplay systems. However, Hyper Scape could not win back the community’s trust, leading to its death in April 2022, less than two years after its release.
Hyper Scape
5Bleeding Edge
Chaotic Battles With Extraordinary Fighters
Ninja Theory’s latest released project was a third-person PvP battle arena that didn’t live long enough.Bleeding Edgewas the very first project by Ninja Theory after their acquisition by Microsoft. The game was released in March 2020 onXbox Oneand PC. As a hero-based brawl game, Bleeding Edge featured 13 characters at launch, each one with unique abilities, attacking styles, and movement skills. While there was a good mixture of ranged and close damage dealers at launch, the game never received meaningful content support, which was the reason why it was left behind less than a year after its release.
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After all, Ninja Theory was not a big enough studio to support Bleeding Edge and work onHellblade 2with a couple of other projects simultaneously, which forced them to end development on Bleeding Edge in January 2021. The game still remains playable, but a look at the player count on Steam will tell you that it’s already dead for the community.
Bleeding Edge
4LawBreakers
Low-Gravity Heroes!
LawBreakersis one of the most saddening stories of the gaming industry. As the debut title by Cliff Bleszinski’s indie studio, Boss Key Productions, LawBreakers seemed like a promising new hero-based competitive shooter set in a low-gravity environment with various game modes, but it never found a solid player base. Released as a paid game on PlayStation 4 and PC, LawBreakers didn’t even make it to the top 100 Most Played titles on Steam at launch, which didn’t take the development team too long to make it a free-to-play experience, but even that didn’t help LawBreakers to make a name for itself among popular competitors likeOverwatch.
While LawBreakers was struggling to get more players, Boss Key Production released a new free-to-play Battle Royale, Radical Heights, in April 2018, but that game was even quicker to fail than LawBreakers, which eventually led Boss Key Productions to shut down the office and take both of its titles to the graveyard.
Lawbreakers
3Battleborn
From Hero To Zero!
If only Battleborn had been released a year earlier, it could have lived much longer, but it was launched only a few weeks earlier than Overwatch, numbering the game’s days before even allowing it to recover itself properly. Battleborn was Gearbox’s take on a competitive hero shooter, and a direct competitor to Overwatch before its launch. The gameplay system in Battleborn was somewhat deeper than that of Overwatch as it featured an upgrade system similar to MOBA titles, where players could enhance their abilities during a match.
The release of Overwatch led to a massive player drop in Battleborn, up to the point that Gearbox had no choice other than to announce a free-to-play model for Battleborn to counter Overwatch, but it still wasn’t enough. In the following years, Hi-Rez also released Paladins, which further affected the player count of Battleborn. The game was eventually delisted from stores in November 2019, and servers were shut down over a year later in January 2021.
Battleborn
2Danger Zone (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive)
When Battle Royale Trend Becomes Undeniable!
Valve is one of those companies that rarely react to the trends in gaming, yet the Battle Royale trend was so big at the time that even a classic game like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tried its luck with it. Danger Zone was Valve’s take on Battle Royale as a brand-new mode in CSGO. Dropping 18 players into a unique Battle Royale map, Danger Zone was quite similar to other games in the same genre, as players will have to scavenge for better weapons and gear either by opening cases or killing opponent players to be the last man standing.
WhenCounter-Strike 2launched in 2023, it lacked Danger Zone. Up until now, Valve has not confirmed the return of Danger Zone to the new home of CS, but the developer recently added Arms Race to the game and mentioned that more game modes will arrive in Counter-Strike 2 in future updates, leaving fans uncertain of the Battle Royale mode’s return.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Fun While It Lasted
Before Epic Games found massive success with Fortnite, it deliveredParagonas a free-to-play MOBA. The game was almost a visually stunning version of League of Legends with a third-person camera view. before its death, Paragon featured over 30 heroes, which was quite good for the beginning, with an engaging combat system that valued skills. That being said, the game was struggling to bring in more players. When Fortnite Battle Royale was launched in 2017 and became incredibly successful, Epic Games decided to cease development on Paragon and shut down its servers in April 2018. Instead, the developers focused on Fortnite, which made it the giant platform it is now.
A few years later, Epic Games released all of Paragon’s assets for free on Unreal Engine, allowing the community to revive the game. In December 2022, Netmarble released Paragon: The Overprime on Steam as an Early Access title. While the game does look quite similar to the Paragon we knew, it lacks that magic touch of Epic Games. Unfortunately, this revived version still carries the doomed fate of the original Paragon, as Netmarble announced later in February 2024 that it will shut down the game’s servers in April 2024.
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