Ace Combat Infinity

» see ace-infinity.bngames.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

My gaming in the years this came out happened on a PC I had built myself, and on Turkish hardware forums where people put their parts list in the signature under every post. Ace Combat Infinity was a PlayStation 3 game and only ever a PlayStation 3 game, free to download, impossible to own. You did not buy it, you logged into it, which turned out to matter enormously later.

It launched in Japan and Asia on 20 May 2014, in North America a week later and in Europe the day after that, following an open beta that had started in November 2013. Bandai Namco announced a million downloads worldwide on 10 July 2014, seven weeks after the Japanese launch, and gave everyone a free Mirage 2000-5 to mark it. No Ace Combat had tried free-to-play before, and almost a decade later none has tried it since.

The game was built around a fuel timer. Each sortie cost a unit of Sortie Fuel, you regenerated one every three hours up to a small cap, and if you wanted to keep flying past that you paid. Everything else was recognizably Ace Combat: an aircraft tree to climb, and missions flown over a version of the real Earth rather than the invented world the series normally uses. The player's callsign was Reaper, flying for a contractor called Arrows.

~ the chronicle ~

~ twenty months of nothing ~

The final update, version 2.11, shipped on 30 March 2016. Nothing further arrived. The shutdown was announced on 8 December 2017, which leaves a gap of roughly twenty months in which the game was still running and still taking money without receiving a single new version. Sony had ended PlayStation 3 production that May, six months before the announcement, and Ace Combat 7 had been revealed for the PlayStation 4 two years earlier.

The wind-down ran across four months. 9 January 2018 was the last day anything could be bought, and on 1 March the game stopped being downloadable and its redemption codes stopped working. The servers closed on 31 March at 17:00 Japan time. The producer's farewell message described the game as entering its landing phase after about three years and ten months and thanked people for putting up with the delays and storms along the way. It gave no reason at all for the ending.

~ what logging in cost you ~

Because the client authenticated before it would do anything, there was no part of Ace Combat Infinity that could outlive its servers. The eight campaign missions were gone. So were the aircraft people had spent years grinding up the tree, and so was anything bought with real money, including single-player content, with no refunds offered to anyone.

~ brought back ~

In April 2026 Bandai Namco posted a memorial video for Infinity as part of the series' thirtieth anniversary, eight years after switching it off, which is the whole of what the publisher has done for it since. Two weeks later a developer released AeroServer, a local reimplementation of the game's server API that let the campaign run again under emulation. By the end of May a small team had gone further and restored multiplayer over a community network, with hosted rooms and matchmaking working again.

The precise shape of that is worth stating. A commercial product that was deliberately engineered so that it could not exist without its publisher has been running since May 2026 without its publisher, assembled from a patched client and a server somebody wrote from scratch by watching what the old one used to say.

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