Every game executive and investor wants a Fortnight. That's why no matter how many times gamers reject it live service games will continue to be developed. Because AAA games are made for investors not players.
It's definitely not the fastest but it's really close.
The fastest full shutdown currently belongs to The Culling 2 which only lasted 2 days between launch and being closed completely.
The Day Before is another big example of a game that lasted an incredibly short time but despite that game lasting 4 days before no longer being sold, the games servers stayed on much longer than that meaning that it was shut down after Concord despite being cancelled before it.
On 11 December, four days after The Day Before launched to widespread criticism, Fntastic announced their closure, stating that as their game had "failed financially" they could not afford to continue operating. The Day Before was removed from sale on Steam later that day.
Exec 1: Should we do research into what gamers want to play?
Exec 2: Nah, just smush together whatever everybody else is doing, slap on a new coat of paint, and then ship that shit. The idiots will eat it up and we'll be rich.
Gamers: Who asked for this? I didn't ask for this. I don't want to play this shit. I've got better shit that I can play for free.
So funny when a corpo is forced to seem positive about something where there is absolutely no positive way of spinning it. It has this surreal energy where the person doing PR seems almost uncanny, like some kind of lizard person.
I'm not entirely oblivious to gaming news, but the literal first I had ever heard of this game was when they announced that it was being shut down. Methinks after eight years of development it could've had a few more dollars tossed into the marketing budget.
I didn’t know it existed until a popular streamer begrudgingly “reviewed” it at the last minute. Found it strange that there was zero marketing for such an expensive and long developed investment.
Honestly this reeks of corporate politics. I'm willing to bet at some point in development there was a regime change, and current management pushed this out the door just to clear the board.
Everything I heard about this came seems to indicate that it isn't terrible by any means, just mediocre and overpriced in an absolutely oversaturated genre. If management was invested in it, they probably could have spent a ton on marketing, achieved middling numbers, and then used those middling numbers to justify continued development for another few months.
I'm confident in saying that because there are a handful of shitty live service games being operated at a loss for no real reason other than shutting them down would mean management would have to actually admit they fucked up.
Aside from all of the problems with the game itself, I think they must've had one of the most unfortunate launch moments. Hero shooters had been pretty much on the downturn and then just before they launched, Deadlock went public and suckered quite a lot of the hero shooter audience into playing a full-on MOBA/FPS hybrid. And Deadlock is very quietly breaking all kinds of silly records for what's technically an invite-only alpha (currently #8 on Steam's most played with 137k concurrent players).