A Look Back at Every Game That Went Offline in 2025
- Sagar Mankar
- 22 hours ago
- 4 min read
2025 turned out to be another tough year for live-service games, with over 50 titles having closed their servers for good.
Electronic Arts (EA) led the charge with a staggering 23 game shutdowns throughout the year. The publisher pulled the plug on Rory McIlroy PGA Tour, The Simpsons: Tapped Out, NCAA Football 14, and several Grid series games.
Ubisoft's XDefiant became one of the year's most discussed casualties, despite launching with an impressive 8 million players in its first week back in May 2024. Executive producer Mark Rubin, who stayed with the game until its June 3 closure before retiring from the industry entirely, opened up about what went wrong. "We had crippling tech debt using an engine that wasn't designed for what we were doing, and we didn't have the engineering resources to ever correct that," Rubin explained candidly. He pointed to persistent netcode issues and insufficient content as major factors, noting that what players saw at Season 3 "wasn't even enough content in my mind for launch."
Warner Bros delivered another crushing blow to platform fighter fans when MultiVersus went offline on May 30. After racking up losses of over $100 million, the dream of a WB-style Smash Bros came to an end. Teased characters like Daffy Duck, Fred Flintstone, and Scooby-Doo never made it into the game, though it can still be played offline as a small silver lining.
The tactical shooter scene took its own hit when Spectre Divide, backed by streaming superstar Shroud, announced its closure merely six months after launching on September 3, 2024. According to Mountaintop Studios co-founder and CEO Nate Mitchell, despite drawing roughly 400,000 total players with a peak concurrent count of 10,000 across platforms, "we haven't seen enough active players and incoming revenue to cover the day-to-day costs." The studio exhausted its options, seeking outside investment, external publishers, and even full acquisition before ultimately shuttering by mid-March. Mitchell stressed that "the industry is in a tough spot right now."
Dauntless, Phoenix Labs’ Monster Hunter-inspired title, met its end on May 30 following the disastrous Awakening update in December 2024. The patch wiped player progress, overhauled progression to favor monetization, and introduced loot boxes. Worse, previously crafted weapons were locked away, with new gear gated behind battle passes or slow currency grinding. The community rebelled, and Phoenix Labs learned the hard way that erasing players’ progress while demanding continued engagement was not a winning strategy.
Capcom closed the book on Resident Evil Re:Verse on June 29, ending the franchise’s latest multiplayer experiment. Bundled with Resident Evil Village, the game never gained traction.
Wargaming's Steelhunters died an especially quick death, shutting down in October just three months after release. The sci-fi mech combat game peaked at barely over 4,000 concurrent players on Steam, failing to offer anything novel to either shooter or mech fans. Free-to-play shooter Ironsight, which attempted to capture early Call of Duty vibes, met its end in August after struggling to peel players away from the world's most popular military shooter franchise.
MMO Skyforge, which challenged players with ascending to godhood over more than 10 years, finally ascended for the last time in October. The game's playerbase had dwindled to under 20 on Steam, though it deserves recognition as one of the precious few MMOs that made it to consoles when it launched there in 2017.
Complete 2025 Game Shutdown List
January 2025
WWE 2K23 (online servers) - January 6
Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Tempestfall - January 10
Rory McIlroy PGA Tour - January 16
The Simpsons: Tapped Out - January 24
Alchemy Stars - January 24
Blood & Glory: Immortals - January 29
Contract Killer: Sniper - January 29
Deer Hunter Classic - January 29
Dino Hunter: Deadly Shores - January 29
Eternity Warriors 4 - January 29
Frontline Commando 2 - January 29
Frontline Commando: D-Day - January 29
The Elder Scrolls: Legends - January 30
February 2025
UFC 3 - February 17
Hood: Outlaws & Legends - February 18
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance - February 24
March 2025
Spectre Divide - March 12
NCAA Football 14 - March 13
EA Sports UFC Mobile 2 - March 13
May 2025
Dauntless - May 30
MultiVersus - May 30
June 2025
XDefiant - June 3
The First Descendant for Xbox One - June 19
Resident Evil Re:Verse - June 29
Madden NFL 21 - June 30
August 2025
Ironsight - August 6
Kritika: Zero - August 7
Splitgate (dedicated servers, switched to P2P) - August 29
Blacklight: Retribution - August 31
September 2025
Skyforge (PC) - September 3
WWE 2K24 (online features) - September 30
October 2025
NHL 21 - October 6
Need for Speed: Rivals - October 7
Steel Hunters - October 8
Madden NFL 22 - October 20
Skyforge (consoles) - October 29
FIFA 23/EA Sports FC 23 - October 30
Sword Art Online Variant Showdown - October 30
PGA Tour 2K21 - October 30
The Golf Club 2019 - October 30
November 2025
Dirt 3 - November 8
Dirt Showdown - November 8
Grid 2 - November 8
Grid Autosport - November 8
PUBG: Battlegrounds for Xbox One & PS4 - November 13
EA SPORTS FC Empires - November 30
December 2025
Grid (2019) - December 19
ChronoForge - December 30
Pandum Online - December 31
Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs - December 31
NBA 2K24 - December 31
Which titles are you going to miss most? Let me know in the comments, and follow Gaming Amigos on X, Bluesky, and Google News.