It's been a long, sometimes bumpy road for Trion Worlds' turn-based tactical combat game Atlas Reactor. And now the end of that road has been reached: Trion announced today that the game is no longer sustainable, and so the servers will be closed.
Atlas Reactor was announced in 2015 and made a promising impression when we got hands-on with it early the following year. It bounced from free-to-play to premium-priced and back again, but it was never able to put together a large, stable following: It peaked at around 3500 concurrent players when it released in October 2016, and again when it switched back to free-to-play in January 2017, but only managed to surpass triple-digit player counts a few times since.
"Atlas Reactor was a truly innovative game built by a passionate group of highly skilled developers. I was lucky enough to watch our team breathe life into the world of Atlas on a daily basis," Mervin Lee Kwai, formerly the chief product manager at Trion Worlds and now vice president of development at Gamigo (which acquired Trion last year) said in a statement.
"They broke the mold of same-y games, and a dedicated community rallied around the title. Despite the support of this great group of fans, Atlas Reactor never grew big enough to fund its continued development. It’s a shame to see this chapter come to a close, but perhaps we’ll have a chance to revisit the innovative spirit of Atlas in the future."
In-game purchasing has been disabled, and items that were previously available for real-money transactions can now be picked up in "new ways," which I assume means through gameplay—Trion didn't specify but said that the XP, Flux, and ISO rates have been turned up "dramatically." Players who have logged in at least once between January 1 and April 16 will also receive "a small parting gift," details of which will be sent to the email address attached to the account.
The current plan is to keep the Atlas Reactor servers up until June 28, although that's subject to change—I suppose there's not much point in keeping the lights on if everybody stops showing up in mid-May. If you'd like to see what it's all about before the lights go out for good, hit it up on Steam.
