Battleborn artwork showing off most of the heroes

To say that Battleborn has had a rough time would be quite an understatement. Despite having a pretty fun concept and some neat hero designs, Gearbox and 2K Games foolishly decided to compete directly with Overwatch, and so Battleborn ended up launching right alongside what is probably the most popular game of 2016.

What followed next wasn't exactly pretty either. Battleborn got shredded critically due to the direct comparison to Overwatch, and what playerbase it did manage to acquire quickly started leaving for greener pastures. Gearbox eventually made it free-to-play in an effort to bring about some sort of revival, but unfortunately the damage had already been done. And so, after about a year of updates, Gearbox finally announced that Battleborn will be slowly winding down and eventually even closing its doors for good.

Quite a bit of time has gone by since then, but the day has finally come. Battleborn has now closed down its servers and nobody will be able to play it ever again. And yes, this does include the somewhat barebones singleplayer mode as well given that it was heavily reliant on the online servers to function.

Before you get to upset about yet another game permanently fading away due to always-online nonsense, it is worth mentioning that Gearbox considered updating the singleplayer mode to work offline. However, after looking at the dismal player count and the costs involved, they opted to forgo that plan for obvious reasons.

While I doubt any of this is even remotely emotional for most of you considering how few people actually played Battleborn in its prime, I must admit I'm always sad to see games fade away, even if they weren't particularly good. There's something about the finality of it all that really strikes a cord with me. There's never going to be a sudden Battleborn revival decades in the future like there was with Battletoads or Age of Empires 2 - it's simply gone forever, and that's the end of the whole story.

As a final, somber note, I'll leave you with one of the very first trailers: