Epic Games announced that it would shut down the servers and network services of many older games, among them Dance Central, Rock Band and Unreal 2 Awakening. By way of consolation, the new Unreal Tournament 3 edition will be made available for free and offer crossplay.
Most of the titles remain playable offline, but they will no longer be available for purchase. A few items will be shut down completely: Battle Breakers will be gone on December 30, while Rock Band Blitz, together with the Rock Band Companion app and SingSpace, will disappear on January 24 next year.
If you made Battle Breakers purchases using Epic’s direct payment system within the last 180 days, you will automatically receive a refund.
Full list of games whose servers will be turned off on January 24 is as follows:
- 1000 Tiny Claws
- Dance Central 1-3 (online multiplayer in Dance Central VR will remain available)
- Green Day: Rock Band
- Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess
- Rock Band 1-3 (online multiplayer in Rock Band 4 will remain available)
- The Beatles: Rock Band
- Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars
- Unreal Gold
- Unreal II: The Awakening
- Unreal Tournament 2003
- Unreal Tournament 2004
- Unreal Tournament 3 (Epic Online Services is planned to bring back online services in the future)
- Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition
Reason for the decision is the move to a unified Epic Online Services system, which supports everything from friend lists, online chat and matchmaking to developer features like purchase management and telemetry data analysis.
This system debuted with Fortnite and is constantly being expanded. Earlier this year, among other things, crossplay support was introduced with PlayStation and Steam.
In the meantime, the Unreal Tournament 3 X page on Steam was updated with a description showing the new version of the game will be free and without microtransactions, as well as allow gameplay between Steam, GOG and Epic Games Store platforms on PC.
Epic themselves have not officially announced anything as of yet, but at this point it remains a matter of time.
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