Today, developer Matt Bromberg made the unfortunate announcement that EA’s upcoming MOBA Dawngate would have its development terminated and services will cease after 90 days:
Whenever we begin a game project, we do so with great hopes and expectations. In this case, we chose to enter a new genre for EA in MOBA, one that we knew going in was extremely competitive. Dawngate has been in beta for almost 18 months, including a full open beta for the past six months. And although the game has grown, we’re not seeing the progress we’d hoped for. This isn’t the outcome we wanted, but beta testing is about learning and improving, and ultimately, about making difficult decisions about how to proceed.
While this is all happening so suddenly, there is a silver lining as players who contributed money towards the beta will have it refunded in full within the next 10 days. It’s nice to see EA giving this back to players who were dedicated enough to put their money into the beta.
As a part of the process of closing down Dawngate, we’ll continue to operate the game for the next 90 days. All players will be entitled to a full refund of any money spent during the beta. For most players, we’ll process those refunds within the next 10 days. If we don’t have current payment information on file for you, we’ll need to reach out first before initiating the refund. If you have any questions, you can reach us at help.ea.com.
With EA abruptly announcing that the game is shutting down, it has left people wondering why this has happened. Were they expecting better numbers from a game that hadn’t actually released yet? Were they comparing player numbers to the likes of League of Legends or DotA which are both completely released? It’s a bit of a bummer though as Dawngate differed itself from the other two and it was great to see a different take on the MOBA genre.