Rumbleverse

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

~ the goodbye ~

In August 2022 I was thirty-eight and had never installed a battle royale in my life. Rumbleverse was free, which is the only reason a game in that shape gets a first weekend at all, and it wanted the sort of attention I stopped giving new multiplayer releases a long time before that.

Iron Galaxy announced it at The Game Awards in December 2021 with Epic Games Publishing behind it. The pitch was a battle royale with no firearms. Forty players dropped into Grapital City, or later into a second map called Low Key Key, and fought with fists and elbow drops until one was standing. You pulled baseball bats and chairs out of boxes, along with magazines that taught you special moves and potions that raised your health or your stamina.

The part that made it feel different was climbing. Every building in the city could be scaled, which gave the map a vertical dimension the genre mostly does not bother with, and Iron Galaxy's own CEO said the players who won most often came from platform games rather than from shooters. A match ran twelve to fifteen minutes.

A February 2022 date slipped and it came out on 11 August instead. The final season arrived three months after that, on 16 November, and the servers went off on 28 February 2023.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

Iron Galaxy spent most of its life doing other people's work. It ported Fortnite and The Elder Scrolls Online to consoles, which is how it learned what a live-service game actually costs to run, and it made the 2013 Killer Instinct. Rumbleverse was its own. The idea came from co-CEO Chelsea Blasko in October 2017 and started as a professional wrestling game, which is where the countdown timer in every match came from.

On PC it was an Epic Games Store exclusive, which in 2022 meant it was not on Steam, which meant a large share of the audience for a free game never saw it sitting in a library next to everything else they owned. It arrived into a market where Fortnite and Warzone had already taken the hours people set aside for this. Streamers did not pick it up, and without streamers a free game has no distribution at all.

~ the day it died ~

The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences announced the nominees for the 26th D.I.C.E. Awards on 12 January 2023, and Rumbleverse was up for Online Game of the Year and Fighting Game of the Year. Nineteen days later the official account posted that the servers would go offline on 28 February and that anyone who had bought anything since launch could have their money back.

The ceremony was held on 23 February at Resorts World in Las Vegas. The game lost both categories and had five days left to live. It had been playable for six months and seventeen days, and every purchase made in that window was refunded, which means Epic closed the experiment having taken nothing at all from the people who showed up for it.

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