More than 15 years after it was revealed to the world, the game once envisioned as Crytek's big move into the online military shooter scene is finally closing
More than 15 years after it was first announced to the world, the PvP military shooter Warface: Clutch is going away. Publisher My.Games announced in February that it has "made the difficult decision to begin the sunset process" for the game, which will shut down for PC players on May 27.
The end of Warface: Clutch caught my attention because I was honestly surprised that Warface: Clutch hadn't closed years ago. The game was announced by Crytek in 2010 as simply Warface, initially for the South Korean market, although the decision to bring it to the West followed a couple years later. It was kind of a big deal for a while, as was Crytek, but while it made a good early impression, the full release in 2014 stumbled.
A battle royale mode followed a few years later (because of course it did) and the development team at Crytek split off to form their own studio, Blackwood Games, in 2019—which as far as I can tell no longer exists. At some point, My.Games took over the whole thing, and we basically forgot about it entirely (I'd forgotten about it well before that, frankly) but Warface trundled on under its updated name, drawing in a small but steady audience over the next half-decade-plus.
Player numbers aren't what they were, though, and My.Games says it's opted to "reallocate its resources toward other products and new initiatives and focus on future developments." All in-game purchases have been disabled, and the game itself will shut down on May 27 on PC, and August 25 for consoles.
Sadly, but to no great surprise, there's no plan to make the game playable post-closure: Warface relies on external servers and once they're gone, "the game will no longer function."
Purely as a matter of sentiment, it's kind of sad to see Warface: Clutch closing. You don't see that kind of durability in online shooters these days, after all. It certainly had a better go of it than Hawked, a co-op PvP shooter launched in 2024 that My.Games is also shutting down. Unlike Warface: Clutch, Hawked never managed to put together a meaningful audience, and the company has seen enough: Hawked will follow Warface into the void on June 9 on PC, and September 7 on console.