World War 3 Taken Offline Forever After Eight Years

World War 3 first surfaced as an early access game way back in 2018, emerging in 2022 as a full game. It never moved mountains in the gaming space, but it was a semi-decent, free-to-play tactical multiplayer shooter that had a community behind it, and that would be more than enough for some developers.

Sadly, on June 3rd, the team at New Generation and Wishlist Games announced that World War 3 would be going offline forever in a few weeks. Today, that time has come, and World War 3 has been shut down globally.

Another One Bites The Dust

In the age where ‘Stop Killing Games’ is on everyone’s minds and the concept of digital gaming is soaring (and not always in a good way), it’s a particularly tough pill to swallow when an online-only game bites the bullet and drops off the board.

That’s what has happened with World War 3, a multiplayer tactical shooter that first surfaced almost eight years ago. Today, it’s being taken offline for good, two months to the day since the developers at New Generation Games posted a sad message on Steam:

We have an important update to share regarding World War 3.

After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to end support for the game and shut down its servers.

The World War 3 servers will be taken offline on 3 August 2026. After this date, the game will no longer be playable.

This was not an easy decision. You have supported us throughout the years and we want to thank everyone who played World War 3, shared feedback, reported issues, created content and kept the community alive.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

In the comments under the post, a mixed reaction was reflected in the responses. One user wrote, ‘How sad, this game had some good potential,’ while another said, ‘Game is already dead.’ There were some bittersweet replies too: ‘Undelivered patches killed the game. I feel bad for it. Still, thank you for keeping it a little bit longer alive!’

World War 3 wasn’t an awful game, but it never picked up much traction, despite being free to consume. It peaked on Steam at just under 12,000 players, and that was in 2022, when the game’s full launch landed on the platform. For almost two years, it has struggled to peak over 300 concurrent players.

In the hours before the game was taken offline, it was barely scraping double digits.

Regardless of the sentiments surrounding the game, it’s always sad to see the fruits of a team’s labor extinguished in the blink of an eye like this, after so many years in the making.

Did you ever play World War 3? Let us know what you thought about the game on the Insider Gaming Discord server.

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