Battleborn Shutting Down In Early 2021

When we last reported on Battleborn in September 2017, it was to pass along the news from Gearbox Software that the game would no longer receive content updates but would still remain online "until the foreseeable future." That future is a bit more foreseeable now, as Battleborn's servers will be going dark in early 2021.

2K Games, which publishes Battleborn, announced nearly two weeks ago -- who says bad news travels quickly? -- that Battleborn's servers will shut down in January 2021. That will make all aspects of the game unplayable, including not only PvP but also the single-player campaign.

While the popular narrative is that Battleborn was doomed from the start, the game actually performed reasonably well upon its launch in May 2016 -- three weeks before Overwatch, to which it was inevitably compared. While its numbers, at least on Steam, probably weren't quite as high as Gearbox had hoped, it still managed to keep several hundred players online at a time, though that had eroded to barely 100 by the time it went free-to-play in June 2017. After an initial surge to 1,561 players, it barely cracked 100 afterwards.

If you still want to play, you'll have to do it mostly without premium currency, as the ability to buy Platinum will be disabled on February 24, 2020, or about two months from now. You can still spend what you've got on what's in the store, though, and you've got plenty of time to do it.