Late to the party but nevertheless. Just a few days ago I wanted to write some news post about the whole The9 vs Qihoo 360 lawsuit that was discussed a month or so ago on the Firefall forum and Reddit, but given the latest development, this seems quite unnecessary to bring up.

Firefall has been taken offline.

Red 5 Studios or whoever remains in charge of Red 5 Studio's operation has published a news item, that they'll shutdown the servers on the 7th of July, which was yesterday. The game servers supposedly aren't accessible anymore, while the auth server currently still works and the forum can also still be accessed.

While it's always sad to see a game go, for Firefall it seem like the better path to close it down. The game has been in a broken state for nearly a year now and nobody knew what was going to happen to it. While shutting down isn't the option people wanted to see, at least it's an option and the big question mark in the air is finally gone.

In addition to the shutdown announcement the news post claims that Red 5 Studio will instead develop a mobile version of Firefall. What this means exactly is left to speculations. Given the different platform it's pretty clear, that we won't be seeing anything close to what has been Firefall for the past decade. Firefall got to where it was due to its excellent combat and ambitious approach of creating an MMO, the mobile experience will never be the same. As the worst case, we might just get a clone of some popular game, but with a re-branding with Firefall's IP, for example Candy Crush but with Crystite. We can hope that it will end up as something neat, but having seen The9's operation in the past, the chances are high that it won't be very good.

For some reason one of the moderator of the Firefall sub-reddit decided to lock down the sub-reddit. We're currently in communication to get it unlocked again, so we all still have a place to tell our Firefall tales and share some good old memories. Firefall's community has been a great one, we made many friends and got to learn some lessons how to deal with trolls. I hope we can stay in touch for the future. Don't hesitate to join the Firefall Discord server.