Deep Silver Buries Dead Island: Epidemic, Its Zombie-Themed MOBA

We’ve been inundated with MOBA games in the last couple of years, however, like all genres heavy in the competitive multiplayer department, there are only so many actions per minute to go around. The latest causality is Deep Silver’s Dead Island: Epidemic, which despite reaching open beta, will be put down permanently come mid-October.

Dead Island: Epidemic, developed by Stunlock Studios and based on the popular 2×4-swinging RPG from Techland, was giving its marching orders earlier this week. The game’s website has been replaced with a farewell message — one also available on Epidemic‘s Steam page.

Although serviceable as a goodbye announcement, those looking for a definitive answer as to why the title has been shuttered will be left wanting:

Dear players,

Ever since starting with the Closed Alpha, and all the way through the Closed Beta and Open Beta, we’ve received a great amount of useful criticism and encouraging feedback from our players. This has been invaluable for all the teams involved in developing the game.

Over the past weeks and months we’ve been evaluating how to proceed with Dead Island: Epidemic and looking towards the future for the game. We’re sad to announce today that we’ve come to the conclusion to cease further development.

We will be leaving the servers and the forums open until October 15th, during which time we’ll run a very large discount on all characters and boosts to give everyone a chance to spend any remaining currency on characters and items you may have wanted to try before, but never did.

We want to thank everyone for their support, their feedback, and their time playing Dead Island: Epidemic! The game would not have been the same without you.

Signed,
Team Dead Island: Epidemic

With this latest turn of events, the entire Dead Island franchise has a giant question mark above it. Earlier this year, Dead Island 2 was delayed until 2016, then a few months later Yager, the developer working on the sequel, was kicked off the project by publisher Deep Silver.

Dead Island: Epidemic [Official website]


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