Kritika: REBOOT is Shutting Down in February 2022.

It’s always a sad day to wake up to an announcement that an MMO you’ve enjoyed, an MMO you’ve spent years not only playing on and off, but also advertising on your channel is shutting down.
MMOs come and go, it comes with the territory. They’re not like traditional games: People don’t just play them, complete them and then move on to the next big thing.
Instead, players play an MMO, then continue playing them indefinitely until they either get bored with the repetitious nature of the game or nobody is left playing it. Unfortunately, the latter holds true for KRITIKA: REBOOT as it was just confirmed by the developers that the game will be shutting down next month.

This is actually kinda surreal. I’ve been covering KRITIKA since before it was released in the West – I think I was the only MMO Youtuber actually dedicating time and resources to the game in any form 4 years ago.
My last video on KRITIKA: REBOOT was from only 4 months ago as well, and now they’re announcing the closure of the game – permanently?

The announcement can be found on both their website and their Steam page and reads as follows:

Announcement About Closing Kritika:Reboot
Hello. This is Kritika:REBOOT.
It is with a heavy heart that we announce about closing current our Kritika:Reboot service, since we started at 13th November 2019. This decision was made relying on that it is hard to sustain our service anymore in spite of team members efforts meantime.
Our schedule for proceeding the closing will be :
– From January 12th(Wed) : Stops selling CASH points.
– On Febuary 16th(Wed) 00:00 (PST) : Server will be closed and any services offering will be stopped.
Most of all, all members of Kritika:Reboot team appreciate to our people enjoying or enjoyed our game so far. We’re sorry that this is happened.
In future, team will keep try more challenge to make better game to fulfill players.
Sorry about this closure again.
Thank you so far.

KRITIKA launched in North America and Europe in September 2017 with En Masse as the publisher, and was shut down in April 2019. ALLM, the developers of the game took this as an opportunity to publish the game directly starting in November 2019, but reception for the game was far less stellar than ALLM had expected.
Taking a look at the concurrent player numbers via Steam, it looks as though there are 46 people playing the game at this very moment, with a peak of 72. 2 days ago, before ALLM announced the game was closing, concurrent players were sitting at approximately 140 to 150.
However, as of the announcement, it seems as though what little remained of the playerbase abandoned the game quite quickly.

Concurrent players peaked 2 years ago at almost 4,000, but within 3 months of launching 75% of its playerbase had already left. This continued over the course of the next several months, even with the addition of new classes, new content and active development.

While KRITIKA and KRITIKA: REBOOT – which are the same game, just FYI, was a very fun hub-MMO to play with some gorgeous character models and great quality action combat, it wasn’t enough to captivate players. To retain their attention long-term, like most hub-MMOs.
And while ALLM are relieving themselves as publisher in the West, I do want to note that Innova is releasing KRITIKA within Russia and CIS countries beginning in the first half of 2022. They’re the same publisher behind Blade & Soul, Crowfall, Aion and Lineage 2 in those territories.
They’re also selling founder’s packs for players to pre-order the free game – which is both alarming and slightly hopeful. On the one hand, that means ALLM are continuing to attempt to milk the MMO playerbase for as much as they possibly can, but on the other hand, could mean additional funding and a potential re-release sometime in the future.

So yeah. Horrible news, as this was a really fun game. But it happens. This is just another casualty, the first of probably many in 2022.