Ubisoft announced that it is ending support for a number of its free-to-play Windows PC games, warning players that popular titles like The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot and Tom Clancy’s EndWar Online will be rendered unplayable as part of a mass shutdown in October.
The publisher’s online collectible card game Might & Magic: Duel of Champions will also shut down permanently in October, while the tactical third-person shooter Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Phantoms will go dark in December.
The announced culling of its PC games catalog suggests that Ubisoft didn’t find much success in the highly competitive free-to-play marketplace. A recent post in the official Ghost Recon Phantoms forums states that the project “was not as successful as we had hoped for, so we had to make the decision to close the game.”
“This decision wasn’t easy for us and we tried to find other ways,” Ubisoft’s statement continues. “But in the end we decided to close the game and focus on other projects.”
Ubisoft ramped up production of several free-to-play PC games in 2013 in an attempt to enter what was, at the time, a lucrative marketplace with potential for growth. The free-to-play market on PCs eroded quickly in the face of competition from more popular and accessible mobile games, however, and earnings from in-game purchases dried up as a result.
As part of the upcoming wave of service shutdowns, Ubisoft’s microtransaction-driven real-time strategy game The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot will shutter on October 25, while Tom Clancy’s EndWar Online and Might & Magic: Duel of Champions will cease operations on October 31. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Phantoms will follow suit with a full shutdown on December 1.
Ubisoft has suspended in-game purchases for affected titles, and all games will remain playable up until their planned shutdown dates. Gameplay for all shuttered games will end permanently by the end of the year, and players will not recoup any cash they’ve spent on microtransactions, according to a final statement from the developers of Ghost Recon Phantoms.
“In line with our terms of sale,” the statement reads, “we hereby inform you that there will be no refund of any virtual currency you have spent in the game or for any resources you still may own on shutdown date, nor any conversion of any remaining virtual currency to another game.”
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.