Warface: Clutch

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

~ the eulogy ~

Trion Worlds announced its Warface territories in July 2012 and Turkey was on the list, next to the United States, Europe and the Australia/New Zealand pair. A Western publisher naming Turkey in a launch announcement in 2012 was not routine. It happened because the game had been designed from the start for markets where nobody was going to pay sixty dollars for a shooter, and Turkey was one of them.

Turkish shooter culture in the years I was actually sitting in internet cafes, 2002 to 2005, meant Counter-Strike and nothing else. By the time a Western publisher was putting Turkey in a press release I was a working engineer who had not booked an hour on a cafe machine in seven years. So the official Turkish presence here is a real fact about this game and it arrived a decade after it would have meant anything to me.

Warface came out of Crytek's Kyiv studio on CryEngine, free to download, with co-op missions on one side and competitive matches on the other and four classes to pick between. The publishing history is a map of the free-to-play business as it existed then: Mail.Ru ran the Russian open beta in 2012, Nexon took Korea and Taiwan, Trion took the West, and eventually MY.GAMES took the whole thing worldwide. The Western release proper landed on 21 October 2013.

The numbers got large in the way free-to-play numbers do. Thirty million registered users by July 2016, forty million by January 2017, close to fifty million by mid-2018. Consoles pushed it further: the Xbox 360 version arrived in 2014, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2018, and thirteen million console accounts appeared inside a single year. In October 2019 MY.GAMES put the total past eighty million. A Nintendo Switch build followed in February 2020.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it scaled ~

The model was ordinary and it held up for a very long time. Nothing cost money to start and almost everything convenient cost money later. The PvE side did the quieter work, giving lapsed players a reason to come back that did not involve losing to teenagers. Crytek kept it on a weekly update cadence that most premium shooters could not match.

In February 2019 the development team split off from Crytek Kyiv and became Blackwood Games, which carried the game forward from there. By the end the international build was carrying the name Warface: Clutch, which is the version that appears on the shutdown notices.

~ the day it died ~

MY.GAMES announced the closure in February 2026. On 26 February the game came off Steam and in-game purchases stopped working, which is the part that tells you a decision is final rather than a negotiation.

PC servers went down on 27 May 2026. Console players got another three months, and the last of them were switched off on 25 August 2026.

Thirteen years is a long run for a free-to-play shooter. Most of the games it launched alongside were gone by 2018, and several of them have graves on this site.

~ what stayed on ~

The Russian and CIS version was not part of the shutdown. Astrum Entertainment, which runs it now, has been moving players off Steam and the Epic Games Store and onto VK Play, with progress and purchases carried across. So the name survives in one language, on one storefront.

That leaves a strange object behind. Warface was one product with one codebase and two operators, and only one half of it has a shutdown date. Everywhere outside Russia, 25 August 2026 is the end of it.

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