Image: Warner Bros. Games
MultiVersus’ open beta, which lasted 11 long months, has come to an end.
Warner Bros. Games’ platform fighting game MultiVersus has officially gone offline this week. The Super Smash Bros.-like game with a bevy of crossover characters concluded 11 long months spent in open beta on June 25, and is going back into development for a full release in 2024.
Developer Player First Games announced that MultiVersus would shut down back in March this year, as the team prepared for a full launch of the game in 2024 with more changes and improvements. The game has retroactively been in open beta for 11 months now, despite the team having moved past calling it a ‘beta’ after it enjoyed a tremendous launch in 2022. Paid special editions of the game were being sold alongside two seasonal battle passes and other microtransactions, none of which are the hallmarks of a game in open beta.
That success did not last forever, and the game has since seen a steady decline in players on platforms like Steam over the last six months. According to SteamDB, the game peaked with a massive 153,000 concurrent players in July 2022. By May this year, that number dropped to an average of 300. Clearly, Player First Games wants to reignite anticipation behind the game after such a drop in popularity, even if the way they’ve gone about it is strange.
According to the developer, changes will be made to, “the content cadence of new characters, maps and modes; netcode and matchmaking improvements; progression system updates; and much more,” once the game fully releases in 2024. Until then, players can still try MultiVersus’ offline modes with all characters and cosmetics temporarily unlocked for play. These items will get locked up again upon full release, and any purchased content will return then too.
Player First Games is banking on MultiVersus making a grand return in 2024, but that remains to be seen. For now, Smash Bros. Ultimate will have to do.