Splash Damage ends Dirty Bomb live development

Dirty Bomb developer Splash Damage is ending live support for its free-to-play multiplayer shooter, though the studio says servers will remain online as long as a “meaningful number of players” are around to use them.

According to a post from the company, Dirty Bomb looks to be another case of a live game with costs that started to outweigh its income, an unfortunate inevitability for many free-to-play games.  

While the game has been online since 2015, Splash Damage says that the financial cost to continue to bring new features and DLC to the game is too high to continue developing new content.

Splash Damage took over publishing rights for Dirty Bomb in 2017 and, as the announcement post explains, bolstered its development team to crank out new content for players of the free-to-play game once that deal was finalized.

“Despite all the added time and resources, there were some challenges we couldn’t overcome, and we were not able to make DB the success that we hoped it could be,“ reads the post. “The bottom line is that we can’t financially justify continuing to work on the game we love.”

Splash Damage is however offering refunds to players that have purchased “Merc Pack DLC” since it won’t be releasing any additional “mercenary” characters in the future.