This year, Christmas is a tough one for AR game players. After the announcement that The Walking Dead: Our World will be discontinued, the next bad news follows. Spokko has recently announced the end of The Witcher: Monster Slayer.
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The great case of The Witcher: Monster Slayer
On September 3, 2020, Spokko, the well-known game company behind classic games like The Witcher and Cyberpunk2077, announced it would be launching an AR game of The Witcher. Titled The Witcher: Monster Slayer, the game launched worldwide on July 21, 2021.
The game got off to a fantastic start, cracking the 100,000,000 install mark after just 8 days. The feedback from the game was a steep upward trend.
The big crash
As good as the launch was, the worse it hit the players when Spokko released update 2.0 a few months later and everything literally went down the drain. The reviews in the app stores overflowed, players changed their reviews from 5 to 1 star and players uninstalled the game faster than Spokko could process the feedback from the community.
Das neue, große Update
As beta testers, we were also accepted into the inner circle by GoGames and were allowed to test a new planned update in advance. Due to an NDA, we were unfortunately not allowed to report on this update until now. The new update was extensively put through its paces by several players and extensive feedback was gathered. The changes looked like a great comeback for the game. The anticipation among the testers was great.
Instead of an update comes the end of The Witcher: Monster Slayer
A few days ago, there was an unexpected bang in the Dicord. Even the community manager of Spokko was obviously surprised by it. One day he thought he was working with his team on the next big update, but the next day he was informed that the game would be discontinued.
We have compiled all the information about the shutdown for you. The following message reached the players a few days ago.
Dear Witchers,
Sadly, we have to announce that our journey with The Witcher: Monster Slayer is coming to an end. We will be shutting down the game on the 30th of June, 2023.
We are proud that we were able to create a location-based AR experience that captured what it was like to be a witcher in real life and gave the community a chance to battle Witcher-world monsters up close and in person. This is what made The Witcher: Monster Slayer such a unique experience in The Witcher franchise.
We are very thankful for sharing all of this with such an amazing and passionate community from all over the world. This journey, filled with quests, events, and adventure, would not have been possible without you — together, we defeated over 100 million monsters worldwide, after all!
Thank you for slaying with us,
Spokko team
P.S. The game will be available on the App Store and Google Play Store until the 31st of January, 2023. From the 1st of February, the game will go through some major changes, leading up to the closing of the game, on the 30th of June 2023. To see the more detailed roadmap, please check out our FAQ.
Differences between FAQ and the official message
If the message of the image talks about “big changes”, the FAQ looks quite different. If you hope for the rollout of the latest updates, which have already been tested internally, the Raodmap does not show this.
The Witcher Monster Slayer — end of the game roadmap:
- 31/01/2023 — The game will be taken down from Google Play and Apple App Store
- 31/01/2023 — We are turning off all in-game purchases, and there will be no new content
- 30/06/2023 — All servers will be shut down.
As you can read here, it’s probably only about disabling the in-game purchases and removing the game from the stores. Further content is definitely denied. So it seems to be a slow death of the game, because without new quests or challenges no one will have interest in the game for the next 6 months.
Conclusion
The Witcher: Monster Slayer is a great example of how you can drive a game against the wall. After a brilliant start, an update that threw everything out of whack brought the game down and broke the publisher’s own neck as well as the game. We remember very well how the players left the official Discord server in droves after this update and gave vent to their displeasure in the reviews and on Facebook. I also enjoyed playing The Witcher: Monster Slayer, but after the update it was a pain and you felt forced to buy items.
Finally, we would like to thank “TheWay”, former Community Manager of TW:MS, SimonSays who took over this role and also the other colleagues of the Discord. We had a great time together, even if it was much too short in our eyes.
