King Of Meat Is Latest Live Service Flop To Announce It Is Shutting Down

Online-only live-service co-op game King of Meat launched last fall. About four months later, the game announced that its servers would be shutting off in April. This has become a very familiar story in the game industry.

King of Meat launched on October 31, 2025, and cost $30. In the lead-up to the launch of the Amazon-published game, it got a flashy (and likely very expensive) animated trailer at Gamescom Opening Night Live in August 2024. There was even a (also likely expensive) promotional video from MrBeast featuring content creators playing King of Meat in a big tournament. Reportedly, leadership at Glowmade, the studio behind the game, was aiming for around 100,000 concurrent players on Steam at launch. It never exceeded more than 400 according to SteamDB and never cracked 1,000 across consoles and PC. Shocking nobody, layoffs were planned in late December. Now, the game is shutting down.

On February 23,  Amazon announced that King of Meat‘s servers will shut off for good on April 9, 2026 in a post titled “The Future of King of Meat.”

“Despite the creativity and innovation Glowmade brought to King of Meat, the game has unfortunately not found the audience we hoped for,” said the post. “As a result, we have made the difficult decision to conclude our investment in the game, and King of Meat’s servers will close on April 9, 2026. Players will be able to access and play all existing content until then, so we encourage you to enjoy your remaining time in the game with your fellow Contenders.”

All players who purchased King of Meat will receive a full refund “in the coming weeks,” according to the post announcing the game’s demise.

“We want to sincerely thank every player who supported King of Meat and the wonderful community that formed around it,” said Amazon. “Your enthusiasm, imagination, and feedback have meant the world to us and to the team at Glowmade. We’re grateful for Glowmade’s partnership and passion throughout this journey and wish them continued success in the future.”

Stop trying to force people to play more live-service games

This is far from the first live-service game that’s announced a shutdown over the last few years. In fact, the odds are high that if a studio launches an online-only live-service game, it will be dead in about a year or less nowadays. We famously saw that with Concord in 2024, which was such a disastrous launch that it died in less than two weeks and torpedoed Sony’s ongoing live-service game efforts, likely leading to canceled projects and studio closures as PlayStation reevaluated its strategy. It hasn’t given up entirely, though.

But Sony isn’t alone in its desperate, messy push for forever games that can print money. Amazon is shutting down its once-popular MMO New World, and before that, killed online shooter Crucible, a game that I can almost bet nobody remembers in 2026. You could make a pretty long list of all the live-service and other online games that have died in recent years. Actually, we have done that. It just keeps happening. And yet, publishers keep investing a lot of money and resources into chasing Fortnite and other live-service hits, despite being surrounded by a graveyard of past attempts. And the few big winners there are these days came out years ago, and everyone is still playing them.

Hopefully, the folks at Glowmade can bounce back, along with all other affected devs, and the industry stops trying to make 500 more live-service games nobody clearly wants. Yes, Helldivers 2 succeeded. There are rare exceptions, sure. But odds are your in-development live-service project won’t be so lucky.