The arena is emptying as Star Wars Hunters goes offline this October

The hunt is over as Star Wars Hunters has announced that it will be taken offline for good on October 1st, with the announcement coming less than a year after the game released.

This is the timeline that the developers have released for the games progress, it will remain playable for the next few months, but come October, the game will be taken offline.

• March 25th, 2025 - Season 5 will be extended by three weeks. We will re-run events and shop bundles from the Season, and the Ranked Season will also be extended, giving players more time to hit Kyber 1 rank.

• April 15th, 2025 - Final content update will be released for free and in-game purchases will be disabled across all platforms. New Support Hunter, Tuya, will join the battle as part of the final update. Tuya will be available and playable for all users immediately at no cost, along with a slate of additional in-game content. We will continue to run a final Ranked Mode leaderboard for players to compete in and run all battlefields and game modes in rotation.

• October 1st, 2025 – Online servers will officially shut down, and Star Wars: Hunters will no longer be playable beyond this point.

On April 15th when the final season launches, the game will no longer offer any arena pass for the game, thus why the final character is free. All in game purchases will be taken offline on the same day, so if you wanted that special skin, you might need to buy it soon, just remember that October deadline.

The game will also not offer any refunds for any un-used items, so if you have Crystals you have been saving, you either use them or lose them, no exceptions. The game will remain available on digital store fronts until October 1st, so players can return to the arena for a few extra bouts if they want, but again as of October 1st, the servers will be shutdown and the game removed from stores.

If this seems like it came out of nowhere, then you would be right. The game was announced in 2021 during the February Nintendo Direct and was meant to release later that year. Mobile gamers started to get hands on with the game at that time, as it launched via a soft release and would then spend the next 2 years refining everything on mobile, but it wasn’t until May 1st, 2024 when we learnt when the full release would be, June 4th 2024.

The game just cracked 10 months of full release and even announced a PC release, but apart from a playtest, it never actually came to be. If you were in the playtest, you can see the game in your library, but it just states that the game is no longer available on Steam.

This is just another example of a game being solidly made, but built around the idea that people need to pay to fully enjoy it and with the way the economy is around the world, people are not spending in games like they used to. Could the game have done better as a premium release, unlikely, more platforms could have helped, but I just think it spent to long in development, so any hype it had from its reveal, was gone completely by the time it released in full. I would love to see the developers release an update that allows for private servers, or even peer to peer matches, because getting some mates together and playing on Switch would be a blast, but seems that is not the case.