Another Live Service Bites the Dust as Tencent Shuts Down F2P Flop Synced a Year After Launch [IGN]

Chinese megacorp has announced plans to shut down Synced just a year after launch, signaling the end of another live service game in this increasingly competitive genre.

Synced is a free-to-play co-op shooter developed by NExT Studios and published by Level Infinite, Tencent’s global games brand. It launched on PC via Steam in September 2023, but after seeing a peak concurrent player count of 10,272 on Valve’s platform, the player count plummeted. Just a month after launch it struggled for 1,000 concurrent players on Steam. At the time of this article’s publication, the 24-hour peak was just 23. Overall Steam user reviews were ‘mixed’, but that has fallen dramatically to ‘mostly negative’ for recent reviews.

In a note to the players who remain, Tencent said Synced “will be retired” this September, a year after launch. Servers go dark on September 9, 2024. It remains playable until then.

Tencent said it may retain some player personal information for a period of time after this date. “The reason we may store your information after terminating Synced is to be able to meet our obligations to you and to other parties,” it said.

“For example, if you choose to exercise your data subject rights (if applicable), such as the right to request access to the personal information we hold about you, we will be able to respond to your request. In addition, we may be legally required to retain certain information about your transactions in Synced for a prescribed period.”

Then: “We are grateful for all the love and support we received for Synced and we hope you will enjoy our other new and existing titles!

“We apologize for any inconvenience caused.”

Synced is the latest casualty in the live service war that has seen an increasing number of participants in recent years. Even games that have thrown hundreds of millions of dollars at their development, including Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, have failed to find an audience. And yet, the live service shooters are coming thick and fast. In recent weeks Korean company Nexon released live service looter shooter The First Descendant, which is a big hit after securing 10 million players in seven days, and NetEase released survival game Once Human, which is off to a strong start on Steam.

As for Synced, it hadn’t received an update since March, so the writing was very much on the wall. Level Infinite is set to publish Sharkmob’s tactical open-world extraction shooter Exoborne, and Funcom’s open world survival MMO Dune Awakening.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.