Dauntless, the monster hunting game that made such a splash when it launched five years ago, is coming to an end. Developer Phoenix Labs has announced on Steam that no further updates or new content will be released, and the game will become unplayable at the end of May.
"Dauntless is shutting down on May 29, 2025," the studio wrote. "Dauntless will receive no additional content or updates. The game will no longer be available to play on May 29, 2025."
That's the entire message, a very bare-bones farewell to a game that came out strong but struggled badly in recent years. Dauntless was initially presented as "the PC Monster Hunter game we've all been waiting for," which held up for about six months until Capcom decided to give us the real deal with Monster Hunter: World. Name recognition was obviously a factor but it was also simply a better game, and Dauntless was quickly overshadowed.
The first signs of real trouble came to light last year, as developer Phoenix Labs announced in May 2024 that it was laying off employees and cancelling in-development projects in a "last-ditch resort" to ensure the studio could survive. But things went from bad to much worse in December when Dauntless finally shed its Epic Games Store exclusivity and made the move to Steam. Instead of ushering in a new wave of badly-needed players, the Steam release was a catastrophe: Player progress was reset, and a new, universally-disliked monetization model was rolled out, leading quickly to an overwhelmingly negative user rating.
In January, a little over a month after that Steam release, Phoenix Labs laid off "the majority of the studio," saying that it would "share more details in the coming weeks about what this means for Dauntless and Fae Farm," Phoenix Labs' Stardew Valley-like life sim. This obviously answers that question regarding Dauntless, but for now there's no word as to whether Fae Farm will share a similar fate.
Some on the Dauntless subreddit pinned the blame for its failure on Phoenix Labs' acquisition by crypto company Forte in 2023, which went almost entirely unnoticed until a 2024 Game Developer report brought the buyout to light. There's no way to judge what impact that really had, but regardless of that there's no getting around the fact that Dauntless was clearly overpowered by Monster Hunter's arrival on PC—and with Monster Hunter: Wilds now just a few days away, and looking very good, that situation was about to get even worse, putting any sort of real turnaround effectively out of reach.
I've reached out to Phoenix Labs to inquire about the future of Fae Farm and will update if I receive a reply.
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