BattleForge

» see battleforge.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In 2009 I had the machine and the connection and no interest whatsoever in buying cards. That accounts for most of why BattleForge and I never met. It asked you for a deck before it asked you for anything else, and in 2009 that request still read as a category error inside a real time strategy game.

The studio was Phenomic, in Ingelheim am Rhein, founded by Volker Wertich in 1997 and known until then for SpellForce. Electronic Arts bought it in August 2006 and renamed it EA Phenomic. BattleForge shipped on 24 March 2009 in North America and two days later across Europe, on Windows, at retail, in a box, for $29.99.

The design was better than the reputation it ended up with. You built a deck out of unit and spell cards, then played them onto a live RTS map by spending an energy pool, which meant every match was a strategy game whose available moves had been decided before it started. Cards came from booster packs bought with BattleForge Points, and an in-game auction house let players sell them to each other. Active accounts earned two points a day for nothing.

There were 200 cards. On 26 May 2009 EA moved the whole thing onto its Play 4 Free label, made the client a free download, and gave new players 32 of those 200 to start with. An EA strategy game going free sixty-three days after it went on sale is not a plan anyone writes in advance.

~ the case file ~

~ what you were actually buying ~

Cards were the product and cards were the problem. People spent years and real money assembling decks, and the auction house gave those decks a running price, which made them feel like property. They were not property. They were rows in a database on a server owned by Electronic Arts, and they existed for exactly as long as EA felt like keeping that process running.

None of this was obvious to everyone in 2009. Digital collectible games were new enough that the collecting half still carried its physical meaning across. BattleForge is one of the earlier cases where a large group of people found out in a single evening that a collection which only exists as server state was a subscription the whole time.

~ the day it died ~

EA closed Phenomic in July 2013 and laid off all sixty employees, part of a wider restructuring that year. With the studio gone there was nobody left to keep the game running, and the free to play numbers had been sliding for a while before that. On 4 September 2013 EA emailed registered players to say the game was being retired.

There was no offline mode. The game was server-side from the login screen onward, so when the servers stopped on 31 October the entire product stopped with them, decks included. Nobody was offered anything for what they had bought.

~ the funny part ~

A group started reverse engineering the server in June 2015, less than two years after the shutdown, working from the client that everyone still had sitting on disk. They called it Skylords Reborn, dropped the trademarked name off the front, and put the game back online on 18 December 2020. It is free, it has no microtransactions in it, and it runs on donations.

So BattleForge has now been alive as an unofficial reconstruction for longer than it was ever alive as an Electronic Arts product. The cards work again. Nobody is selling them.

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