Hawked is the latest casualty of the live-service gaming market, as the studio behind the Fortnite-like shooter has announced that it’ll be pulling the plug on its servers later this year. Developer My.Games has already disabled all in-game purchases and payments, and the current Renegade Pass will be extended until September 7.
“It was a great hunt, and we are grateful to every Renegade who joined the journey: exploring the jungles and ruins of X-Isle, chasing Caravans and Relics, solving puzzles and uncovering mysteries, battling VEKTR, and simply enjoying the adventure together,” My.Games wrote in a blog post. “We are closing this chapter to focus on new challenges ahead.”
Servers for Hawked will remain operational until June 9 for PC players, while the deadline for console players is September 7. After those dates, the game and its online services will be permanently retired. First revealed in 2022, Hawked launched for PC a year later and then made its way to PS5 and Xbox Series X|S in 2024. The core loop of Hawked saw teams of up to three players race to collect and extract Artifacts from an island known as X-Isle, using the unique skills of one of several “Renegade” characters.
In the years since it launched, the live-service market has only gotten tougher for new games, as high-profile games like Highguard and Concord lasted mere weeks after launch before they ran out of momentum and went offline. In comparison, Hawked lasted much longer than many of its peers in this space, but its audience eventually declined. On PC via Steam, Hawked had an all-time peak of 2,544 concurrent players, but in the months after, it rarely breached the 100-player mark.
New research also suggests that established players in the market–like Fortnite and Apex Legends–are experiencing a drop in players, and those playing massive games like Roblox and Minecraft are less likely to play other AAA video games.