Daybreak Game Company, notable for the PlanetSide and the EverQuest series, launched the free to play game PlanetSide Arena into early access September 19th of 2019. Arena was Daybreak’s newest attempt to expand the scope of their Action/MMO games, something Daybreak is always trying to do with their games. The largest game mode was intended to have 3,000 player battles. A game mode which could take the world record for most players in battle for a FPS game from, the previous entry, PlanetSide 2. This mode did not make it into early access instead Arena launched with a 12 squad, 300 player battle mode at first.
PlanetSide Arena did not ever gather a large community despite the free entry. Arena only garnered an average of 500 players in the opening month, peaking at 1,500. The following month player count steeply declined, peaking at 300 and averaging at 60. The following two months are even worse, peaking at 70 players. This has prompted Daybreak to decide that Arena was not gaining enough of following and to shutdown the servers as the community was too small for the game that was planned.
PlanetSide Arena will formally shut down servers on January 10th, 2020 at 5:00 PM (PST)
Said Andy Sites, Executive Producer of the PlanetSide Franchise, on the announcement on the Steam Forum. Daybreak has promised that they are working Valve to give refunds to everyone that made purchases in the game. Players should be receiving the refunds back into their Steam Wallets after the official shutdown of PlanetSide Arena’s servers. As well, DLCs and in game purchases are disabled as well. Players can continue to play until the shutdown time though the game will not be playable in any fashion afterwords. The announcement did try to reassure the PlanetSide community, that Daybreak is not going to shelf the IP and will be dedicated to continuing the franchise along with the fictional universe.