Hi-Rez Studios has announced the upcoming closure of two of its games, Divine Knockout and Realm Royale Reforged, which will be taken offline in February 2025. The pending shutdowns come less than a month after the studio laid off an unspecified number of employees, saying at the time that the cuts were necessary "to ensure Hi-Rez's long-term success."
"It’s with a heavy heart from all of us at Evil Mojo Games that we have to inform you that as part of Hi-Rez’s recent re-org, Realm Royale will be sunset and the servers shut down on February 17, 2025," the Realm Royale Reforged shutdown announcement states. "Following this date, the game will be removed from digital storefronts and you will no longer be able to purchase it and any related content such as DLC."
A nearly identical shutdown announcement was posted on the Divine Knockout Steam page.
Realm Royale launched into early access on Steam in 2018 and then moved into open beta in early 2019. The Reforged update arrived in 2022, "bringing back mechanics from Realm Royale’s earlier stages that players loved, while building upon the improvements and features that players are familiar with today."
But while the Reforged update sparked a brief bump in players, and Realm Royale Reforged holds a "mostly positive" rating across more than 56,000 user reviews, concurrent player counts were never great: A very strong start of more than 105,000 concurrents when the game launch quickly tailed off to a few thousand, and then several hundred, players at a time; the concurrent player count over the past 24 hours, according to SteamDB, was just 402.
Divine Knockout, which arrived in December 2022, didn't fare as well: Its overall review rating is "mixed" and its concurrent player count hasn't broken 100 since February. In-game content for both games was made "effectively free" earlier this year, but the change had no meaningful impact on player numbers.
That's not a good situation for any game to be in, and particular when the publisher appears to be struggling and retrenching: In the announcement of layoffs earlier this month, Hi-Rez said it has "decided to concentrate our efforts entirely on Smite 2, outside of small teams supporting light updates for Paladins and Smite 1."
Smite 2 launched into early access in August, but continues to lag well behind the original in terms of player numbers: Its 24-hour peak concurrent player count was 1,974, compared to 7,285 for Smite. Concurrent player numbers aren't everything, of course—as we pointed out in 2022, games are too often declared "dead" when those numbers naturally decrease over time. But it does seem like Hi-Rez has struggled to land a hit in the years since Smite and Paladins.
