Guns Up!

~ the goodbye ~

Guns Up! arrived on 5 December 2015 as one of the PlayStation 4's free-to-play titles, back when that was a category Sony was still actively trying to make work. You built a base along a horizontal strip of ground, then sent soldiers from left to right at somebody else's base while their soldiers walked at yours. Attacking was live and defending was not, so your fortification had to hold on the strength of its own layout while you were asleep.

Valkyrie Entertainment developed it with Sony's San Diego Studio attached, and it outlasted most of the free-to-play PlayStation experiment it had been part of. A Windows build followed on 5 February 2018, and NHN Bigfoot's mobile version on 1 April 2022, by which point the original was already six years old.

Sony posted the decommission notice on 14 October 2022. Multiplayer and every online feature would terminate on 14 April 2023, and since the whole game was online, that did not mean losing a mode. It meant the game would stop existing.

I did not own a PlayStation 4. Consoles carried an import premium in Turkey through those years that kept them in the category of hardware you read about, and my own gaming stayed on whatever PC I had put together for work anyway. Guns Up! was free, which in principle removes the barrier to entry, and locked to one platform, which puts it straight back.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the eight-month reprieve ~

What happened next is rare enough to be the reason this grave is worth writing at all. On 13 April 2023, the day before the switch-off, the PlayStation Store page was quietly edited and the team announced that the decommission had moved to December. The stated reason was the players: the studio said it had been moved by the support and by the accounts people had sent in of their time with the game, and that it was that enthusiasm which had kept the thing running as long as it had.

Eight months is a serious extension. Shutdowns get pushed by a week or two fairly often, usually because something legal or technical is not ready in time, and they very rarely get pushed because the mail was good. For a title Sony had already written off, somebody made an internal case to keep paying for eight more months of servers for an eight-year-old free-to-play game with no future in it.

~ the one-day disagreement ~

The two first-party channels then published two different dates, and both are quotable. The developer's Steam announcement is headed "Attention soldiers! The GUNS UP! Decommission will occur on 14-DEC-23". The PlayStation Store page and the game's own site said online features would be terminated and no longer available "starting 12/15/23". Those reconcile if you read the first as the event and the second as the first morning without it, which is how this grave is dated.

~ the korean branch ~

The mobile version was never part of any of this. NHN Bigfoot had launched Guns Up! Mobile globally on 1 April 2022 with its own servers and its own progression, and it carried on after the console and PC game was gone, which left a dead game with a living port attached to it.

That ended too, on a schedule NHN published in full. The final content update went out in February 2026 and paid item sales stopped at the end of April, with the app taken off both mobile storefronts from 28 April. The servers went off at 10:00 on 28 May 2026, and the Discord and the Naver Lounge closed the next day at noon. Refunds were offered on unused gems bought after 1 June 2025, with a window running to the end of June 2026. The Guns Up! name therefore carries two death dates two and a half years apart, and the Korean one came with the longer notice.

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