A mere five months after releasing Galactic Reign, Microsoft has confirmed that the game will no longer be available for download after April 15 and that its servers will go offline by the end of the year. Microsoft also explains that the game was an exploration of cloud-based rendering as a game concept. The company will continue to explore new ideas and have chosen to shut this one down.
It is an unceremonious end to what was touted as the first Universal Game for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 (meaning the same game is available across all Windows 8 flavors). Much like Cross Buy for Playstation 3 and Vita, buying one version of the game on mobile gets you a free copy for PC, and vice versa. Even worse, the game just came out last March, giving this grand experiment a mere five months before getting shelved.
Galactic Reign's unique value proposition is how it is based around the cloud. A strategy game in the same mold as Skulls of the Shogun, the game places you in a space wars scenario and tasks you in building up a solid fleet. Now, you don't get to participate in the battles directly. Instead, the battle is calculated and played out in the cloud, and the sent back to you as a video you can watch through, as well as pause and analyze move by move, ship by ship.
The game's developer, Slant Six Games, is an award-winning company coming out of British Columbia, and are best known for making games in the SOCOM series, as well as Resident Evil:Raccoon City. The latter is one of Capcom's best-selling games of all time. Slant Six was uniquely positioned to make this game, as the creators of the Hexane engine, which competes with Unity in making games with parity on both PC and mobile. I checked their site and it seems the company has already moved on to a new iOS board game called Max's Pirate Planet.
Microsoft has faced criticism for not promoting games on their Windows 8 platform enough, and now it seems we have a major casualty of that neglect. If Microsoft wants us to place more confidence in them for Xbox One, they will need to prove their trustworthiness to developers on all their platforms too.
Source: Xbox Forums
