Without warning, Warhammer 40,000: Regicide has been removed from Steam and shut down
Servers for the Warhammer-does-chess game were shuttered a week before the announcement was made on Steam.
Warhammer 40,000: Regicide is a bolters-and-chainswords take on chess that was good enough to land square in the middle of our grand ranking of every WH40K game ever. Sadly, its days of glory are over: After seven years of operation, the servers have been closed and the Regicide has been delisted from Steam and mobile storefronts.
"Thank you for an incredible seven years of Warhammer 40,000 Regicide 2015-2022!" the studio announced last week. "Congratulations to all our ranked match tournament participants with over 300,000 active players and over 600,000 matches in each mode.
"Unfortunately, we regretfully announce the immediate closure of the servers and will be unlisting the Steam Release, Google Play Store, and the iOS App Store from Today, the 14th of October, 2022."
The good news for anyone who owns the game is that Regicide will continue to operate offline. The bad news is that the campaign is "the weakest part of Regicide," we said in our 70% review. Fortunately, the skirmish mode—which is where Regicide really shines—is also playable offline, and higher-level AIs make for a pretty good challenge.
Hammerfall didn't say why Regicide was taken offline, although it's not all that unusual for the plug to be pulled on older games. What is a bit strange in this instance is how suddenly it all seemed to happen. The announcement of the closure and delisting on Steam, which went up earlier today—a full week after the game was delisted—is the first update since July 2017, and several people have complained that it happened without advance warning.
"Nice, they are shutting down the servers," TheBlasterMaster wrote in one particularly succinct reaction. "Bought this not long ago. BS."
I've reached out to Hammerfall for more information on the shutdown and will update if I receive a reply.