The Hobbit: Armies of the Third Age

» see kabam.com/hobbit-armies-of-the-third-age as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

kabam's facebook browser games did not reach my browser. i was on steam by 2013 and the facebook game slot on my account had already gone dormant. i am a computer engineer in ankara who watched the peter jackson hobbit trilogy in theatres but never signed a licensed tie-in browser game into a facebook login. anyway, that was not my demographic in that year.

kabam launched armies of the third age on 21 march 2013, timed to the second hobbit film's theatrical run. the studio had been doing well with mobile kingdom-management titles (the mobile hobbit game they released the year before had done real revenue), and this was the web-and-facebook version aimed at a different audience. warner bros. interactive was the licensor on the tolkien side.

the game closed on 20 june 2014, about fifteen months in. kabam did not give a public reason more detailed than closing under-performing web titles to focus on mobile. that was the shape of the whole facebook-games market by mid-2014. the platform had peaked in 2011-2012 and the traffic was already draining toward phones.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually was ~

armies of the third age was a kingdom-management strategy game. you built a base in middle-earth. picked a race, either dwarves or orcs on the two ends of the alignment axis with the elves as the third playable option. you controlled named characters from the hobbit. bilbo baggins on one side of the alignment, gollum somewhere in between. yazneg the orc showed up on the antagonist side. the combat was army-versus-army with timed builds and resource harvesting under an alliance layer that let players group up.

the pitch was the tolkien license on top of the kabam mobile-strategy mechanics ported to a browser. really though, the mechanics were the same shape kabam had run before with kingdoms of camelot on facebook. the license was the differentiator. tie-in web games for movie releases were still a normal marketing spend in 2013, but the audience was already elsewhere by then.

~ what really happened ~

kabam posted the shutdown notice in june 2014. servers off on 20 june. no farewell content. no offline archive. the browser urls that had hosted the game returned dead pages within a few weeks and the facebook app was pulled off the app directory. but the facebook-games retrospectives written a few years later put it among a dozen kabam titles that closed in 2013-2015 as the studio pivoted to mobile-first.

kabam kept its mobile hobbit game running longer (that one had different economics), and the studio's mobile-first pivot eventually took it into the netmarble acquisition in 2017. the browser side of the business was already done by then. armies of the third age was one of the smaller casualties on the way out of the facebook-games era, next to [[mafia-wars]] and [[cityville]] as ways of remembering what that whole layer looked like.

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