The Witcher Battle Arena
~ the eulogy ~
By 2015 I was in my thirties and had not installed a mobile game in years. A touchscreen MOBA that year was built for people who played something short on a commute, and I was driving to work in Ankara. The Witcher Battle Arena is in this corpus because of the name on the box. The player numbers never justified anything.
CD Projekt Red announced it in July 2014 as a free-to-play MOBA for phones, co-developed with Fuero Games, a small Polish studio, on the Unity engine. It shipped for Android and iOS on 22 January 2015 and reached Windows Phone later in the year. Eight heroes from the series, three skills each. Everything beyond that came through microtransactions. Matches were short and the controls were designed for thumbs, which in 2015 was still an open design question rather than a solved one.
Four months after the phone game launched, the same company released The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, sold it into the tens of millions, and stopped being a mid-size Polish studio. The mobile MOBA kept receiving content updates through 2015 anyway, which is more support than most abandoned spinoffs get. Critics had been lukewarm from the start. Metacritic aggregated the reviews to 63 out of 100 and TouchArcade gave it two and a half stars out of five.
~ the dossier ~
| Born | 22 January 2015 on Android and iOS, later Windows Phone |
|---|---|
| Peak | Eight playable heroes, three skills each, Metacritic 63 |
| Killed | 31 December 2015 |
| Lifespan | 11 months |
| Made by | CD Projekt Red with Fuero Games, on Unity |
| Killed by | Not enough players to justify a second year of servers |
~ how it landed ~
The mobile MOBA window was crowded and brief. Vainglory had arrived with Apple on stage in 2014, and for about eighteen months every publisher holding a fantasy license was looking at the genre the way they would later look at battle royales. CD Projekt Red's version had the best art direction in that cohort and the smallest audience, because the people who cared about Geralt were on PC waiting for a 100-hour role-playing game, and the people who wanted a MOBA on a phone had no particular reason to want this one.
The servers went dark on 31 December 2015, under a year after launch. CD Projekt Red did not stage a farewell event. The clearest statement the company ever made about it is a support page dated 5 June 2016, headed "The Witcher Battle Arena is no longer supported", which now survives only because somebody archived it.
~ the funny part ~
CD Projekt Red has shipped exactly two mobile games and killed both. Battle Arena went at the end of 2015. The Witcher: Monster Slayer, an augmented reality monster hunt in the Pokemon Go shape, launched in July 2021 and shut on 30 June 2023, lasting about twice as long and ending the same way. The studio that cannot stop winning on desktop has never once made a phone work for it.
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other gaming: Rec Room, Westwood Studios, Ghost in the Shell: First Assault Online, Orcs Must Die! Unchained
also died in 2015-2019: Adblock Edge, Opera Turbo, Xombrero
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