2K Games announced this week that the Battleborn servers will shut down as of January 2021, leading everyone to ask the same question; “Battleborn’s servers were still online?”
Battleborn famously launched in May 2016 and became known as the game killed in the crib by Overwatch which released just three weeks after. Following a steep decline in users once Overwatch actually launched, Battleborn languished for a year and a half until Gearbox finally pulled the plug and announced that the title would no longer be seeing any content updates. After that it was only a matter of time until the servers were taken down for good.
For what it’s worth, Battleborn was actually a decent game. Not great, but decent. It was less of the Overwatch that it was compared to and more of a first person shooter variant of a Dota-style game. GQ’s Joshua Rivera made an analogy in 2017 that still fits:
“Imagine you opened up a new, pretty good pizza shop in your neighborhood, a place where people like pizza but can’t really get any nearby. It’s a good idea; the demand is there, and you’ve got a pretty good supply. Not the best slice you’ve ever had, but you can reliably make a solid pie that should make your spot a hit. Now imagine that two weeks later, let’s say… Paul Rudd opens a pizza shop a block away. And not only is that pizza shop a place where you can go and hang out with Paul Rudd and all his famous friends, but it turns out that Paul Rudd is like, a pizza savant? Just freaking impossibly good at slingin’ pies, that Paul Rudd.”
As of right now, Battleborn has been removed from digital store shelves (although you can probably still find piles of unopened copies at Goodwill). Digital currency is being removed from sale in February 2020 and the game will no longer be playable once the servers go down in January 2021.
Source: Twitter
