Star Conflict

» see star-conflict.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Star Conflict was a free-to-play space shooter that behaved like an MMO. You flew one ship at a time through asteroid fields and the wreckage of much larger things. Around that sat a collection you could never finish and a corporation you flew with, both funded by the usual free-to-play grind for the parts that made any of it competitive. Open beta started on 24 July 2012. It reached Steam on 27 February 2013 and a version numbered 1.0 on 4 September 2014, by which point the game had been rebuilt enough times that the 1.0 was mostly paperwork.

It was built by Star Gem Inc. on the Hammer engine and published by Gaijin Entertainment, the company most people know for War Thunder. One side effect of that parentage: it shipped a Linux client and kept it working, which is not something the genre has often bothered with. The ship roster and the ship classes both kept moving underneath it, enough that Gaijin's own farewell admits the game "changed several times, becoming almost a different game altogether".

I did not fly in it. By 2012 I was years out of university and working as an engineer, and the free-to-play space sim was a category I watched scroll past on Steam's front page without ever installing one. What I can read off the ending is the arithmetic. Fourteen years is a long time to keep a free-to-play game funded on people caring about ship upgrades, and most of its contemporaries from 2012 were switched off a decade before it was.

~ the record ~

~ the long wind-down ~

The ending was announced in April 2026 and then run as a schedule rather than a switch. New account registration was disabled on 14 May 2026. In-game purchases went off on 1 June, which is the real signal in a free-to-play game, because it is the point where the company stops taking money from people it is about to disconnect. The official forum closed on 8 October at 13:00 GMT, one day before the servers.

The causes Gaijin gave in public were money and age: infrastructure costs that kept rising against a player base that kept thinning, plus technical limits it could no longer work around. Neither half is a scandal. That is what happens to a 2012 codebase still paying for hardware in 2026.

~ the day it died ~

The servers went off on 9 October 2026 at 10:00 GMT. The site still carries the legal version of the sentence in capital letters, which reads strangely next to the rest of the page: "ON OCTOBER 9, 2026, AT 13:00 (UTC+3), GAIJIN CEASED OPERATION OF THE GAME STAR CONFLICT". Same instant, two time zones, one of them for the lawyers.

The April announcement had named 10 October. The game actually stopped a day early, and the record is split on it: the English Wikipedia article still says the tenth, while the company's own notice says the ninth, twice. The farewell letter is worth reading for what it chooses to be sorry about. It lists the mistakes, mentions the updates that "unexpectedly turned into several hours", and thanks the people who criticized the game on the grounds that "sometimes it was precisely because of you that the game got better".

~ the community edition ~

Then Gaijin released the game as a thing you could host yourself. The instructions sit on star-conflict.com today, and they are not marketing copy. They explain how to run the MongoDB instance that holds the local server's data and how to point the batch file at a Redis executable so the leaderboards work. Further down there is a console command that puts the server into maintenance mode before you shut it down, and a note that the game data lives in the pc\data folder, some of it used by the client and the server at once.

A dead MMO usually leaves nothing you can run. This one left a README. The last line of the farewell is written for someone who comes back years later and opens it: "And if one day you open the Community Edition again, see a familiar ship, and for a moment recall that very evening when you first went into battle, then it was all worth it."

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