Bandai Namco announced that it’s free-to-play Playstation 3 game, SoulCalibur: Lost Swords, will be shutting down this year.
In a tiered shutdown, Lost Swords will stop the sale of consumable items on September 30th, discontinue the sale of all in-game items on October 30th, and finally shut the game down entirely at 3 AM EDT on November 30th.
Launching in April of 2014, the game didn’t see a long lifespan in its little more than one year run, although it had received over 2 million downloads. Producer Masaaki Hoshino explained that is all boiled down to the games pay-to-win model.
“… well, originally, we were thinking about having a multiplayer option,” he said. “But because we’re going with a pay-to-win model, we were worried that by having online multiplayer, for all the new users that would be coming in experiencing the game for the first time, they might be immediately deterred by fighting against opponents who had superior equipment and gear–and we didn’t want to have that kind of negative impact on new players.”