Epic Games announced On Wednesday it shut down “outdated online services and servers” for older games. The first three Rock Band games will have online servers shut down on January 24, alongside servers for Unreal Gold, Unreal Tournament 3, And much more. Epic Games said it was looking to “only support Epic Online Services with its unified friends system, voice chat features, parental controls, and parental verification features.”
The majority of games included in Wednesday’s list will be available to play offline, Epic Games said – but not all. Here is the list of games that will be offline on January 24, but will still be available without internet:
- 1000 small claws
- dance center 1-3 (VR Dance Center online multiplayer will remain available)
- Green day: rock band
- Monsters have (probably) stolen my princess
- rock band 1–3 (rock band 4 online multiplayer will remain available)
- The Beatles: rock band
- Supersonic acrobatic rocket-powered combat-Cars
- unreal gold
- Unreal 2: Awakening
- Unreal Tournament 2003
- Unreal Tournament 2004
- Unreal Tournament 3
- Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition
Epic Games is removing these games from its online storefront, so players will no longer be able to purchase them or the associated DLCs. Along with these titles, hateful boyfriend and Hatoful Boyfriend: Vacation Star are no longer available for Mac and Linux – but people who already own the game can still play.
Epic Games says it intends to bring features back online for Unreal Tournament 3and the game’s Steam page now lists an “all-free” version of the game which “supports cross-play between all PC players, whether they’re signed in to their Steam, Epic Games Store, or GOG accounts.” Epic promises “No microtransactions and no conditions”, for the game it calls Unreal Tournament X.
On December 30, Epic Games announced the closure of 2019 Battle Breaker, which will no longer be playable. Epic, which published the game, will refund players made through its Epic payment system 180 days before Wednesday. On January 24, the alpha version of the project Unreal Tournament to restart, Rock band Blitzthe rock band mate app, and SingSpace will meet the same fate – closed and unplayable.
Most of these games are quite old, like unreal goldreleased in 1998. But some, like Battle Breaker, are more recent. The discontinuation of games from the Unreal franchise, which remain very popular, alongside Rock Band games, is the most surprising of the lot. Both franchises have sold millions of games, but the playerbases for some of the older games are probably quite low.
