The increasingly competitive web3 gaming market claims two more fallen fighters as both City States: Medieval and Axes Metaverse announce a closing of their game servers. Will these games return in the future? It seems doubtful, but it is still a possibility!
Two recent announcements from web3 games highlight that not all is rosy in the gaming world. Both City States: Medieval and Axes Metaverse have shutdown their game servers, with varying messages about the future.
City States: Medieval
City States brought their Discord down to a bare minimum, with just the closing announcement and a general chat. In fact, you can’t even invite anyone new to join! They also shutdown their game server with a rather confusing statement.
Today we have decided to shut down the CityStates game server. While we could keep it running at low cost, there is not really a point when we are not able to fix bugs and exploits or add stuff that is needed to generate income.
Working around the double-negative, it seems that though keeping the server up doesn’t cost much, they don’t have the funds to add new features or even bugfix! The City States team also suggests that anyone with HEX tokens left on their exchange, to set a sell order for $0.00225 and they will buy it back to help players cash out their tokens.
Without even a message of potential hope for the future, it seems that City States is dead for good.
Axes Metaverse
On the other hand, Axes at least leaves us with a mention of a future for the game. The game has remained basically the same since it first launched, and the team was unable to attract the market they had hoped for. And so, the team will shutdown the game servers on May 25th, 4pm UTC. They say that they will wait for a “better market for Web3 games” and make some updates, focusing the product more towards web3 gamers rather than trying to bridge the gap to traditional gamers.
Axes plans to keep their marketplace open, though without a game, I can’t see there being much interest in these NFTs.
Unfortunately, I can’t say that I have much hope for Axes. Their game was entertaining and had potential. But with little variety between the matches, and a stagnant ecosystem, it’s not really a surprise that they didn’t bring in a large playerbase. And though they try and point blame at the current markets, there are hundreds of other web3 games still growing and building. I guess we’ll see what happens!
Closing Thoughts
These aren’t the only games to close up shop recently. Chainmonsters also announced a server shutdown recently after a disappointing land sale.
And I do appreciate that both City States and Axes took the time and social effort to post announcements about the closing. So many other game teams just fade quietly into the night, leaving their playerbase wondering.
Though this news isn’t so great for the dev teams or the engaged players, it is a sign of an increasingly competitive web3 gaming market!
