Rocket Arena

» see ea.com/games/rocket-arena as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Rocket Arena came out on 14 July 2020 for PC and both current consoles, developed by Final Strike Games in Seattle and published by Electronic Arts under the EA Originals label. The hook was that every weapon in it was a rocket launcher. You used rockets to shoot people and you used rockets to move yourself around the map, and there was no death: taking enough damage blasted you out of the arena, and you came back a few seconds later.

It reviewed decently. The movement was praised and the characters had personality. The complaint running through almost every write-up was that there was not very much of it. A 3v3 arena shooter with a small roster and a handful of modes was shipping in a year when the games it had to beat were Apex Legends and Valorant, and it was asking $29.99 while both of those asked nothing.

On 18 November 2023 it disappeared from every digital storefront without any prior warning, which is the kind of thing publishers do when a decision has been made and the announcement has not been written yet. The announcement came on 14 December: EA and Final Strike confirmed the servers would close on 21 March 2024. Xbox achievements were discontinued along with it, which meant the ones nobody had unlocked yet became permanently unobtainable.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the funny part ~

EA's own marketing page for the game is still up. The title tag on it reads "Rocket Arena - an Action Fueled Explosive 3v3 Shooter - EA Official Site" and it will sell you on a game whose servers have been off since March 2024. Nobody took it down because nobody owns taking it down.

That page is the whole shape of a modern shutdown in one artifact. The product is gone, the storefront listing is gone, the achievements are frozen, and the brochure is still in the rack.

~ the inheritance ~

March 2024 was a bad month for games as property. Rocket Arena went off on the 21st and The Crew went off on the 31st, and the second one turned into the Stop Killing Games campaign and a European petition, because The Crew had sold millions of copies of something people thought they owned. Rocket Arena had the same legal structure and far fewer people to be angry about it, so it went quietly.

I watched both of these from the outside, as somebody who buys a game maybe twice a year now and did not buy either. What I notice looking back at the pair is the asking price. The Crew was a $60 game and Rocket Arena was a $30 game, and in both cases what the money bought was access for as long as the publisher felt like paying for servers. Apex Legends and Valorant asked nothing up front in 2020 and both of them are still running.

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