EA and Mythic are shutting down their Free-To-Play Warhammer Battle Arena game in the coming weeks. Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes will be gone forever on March 29th. A small ceremony will be held in an undisclosed location by close family. Donations can be made to the charity of your choice.
The game’s being prematurely ended due to not meeting the financial requirement to keep it running. The game started open beta in April of last year meaning that the game won’t have even been running for a full 12 months. This allows a stark and worrisome understanding of the limited playerbase, or at least those playing and willing to actively spend money.
Considerations of why this lack of player engagement might have occurred are down to intense competition from other sources. The gameplay that WO:WOH offered is similar, but not entirely so, to other games with more enthusiastic and dedicated fan-bases like League of Legends and DOTA 2. It’s likely that there just wasn’t room for paying attention to another free to play game.
Players can no longer buy any of the game’s currency and those that have already bought some won’t be receiving a refund, though some players will be getting a promotional code for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. It hasn’t been revealed how these will be doled out yet.
My suggestions to anyone affected by this closure would be to, next time, spend more money on things you like that you don’t necessarily have to pay for.