Games That Lost Their Entire Playerbase In 2025

It's really the best of times and worst of times for the gaming industry right now. The world is getting hyped for some of the biggest releases in gaming history, like "Grand Theft Auto 6." At the same time, industry layoffs are so common that concerned gamers have created entire websites dedicated to tracking the thousands of developers who are losing their jobs.

The gaming industry is more unpredictable than ever, and that really becomes clear when you start looking at the player counts on popular games. While 2025 is full of mindblowing new releases, this year has also proved that games can crash and burn just as quickly as they can skyrocket to success. Games with more than a million players have become ghost towns in the blink of an eye, and some titles have disappeared completely. At least half a dozen games have seen their playerbase empty out in 2025 — and most of them aren't even a year old yet.

The back of the box — if it existed — would make "Marvel Rivals" sound like a superhero fan's dream come true. The multiplayer hero shooter pits teams of famous Marvel characters against each other in fast-paced battles that could be ripped from the pages of a comic book. "Marvel Rivals" debuted in December 2024, and at the time it really felt like a breath of fresh air. Gamers poured in by the hundreds of thousands, and fans pointed to the game as an example of the free-to-play model done right.

But as is the case with virtually every live service game, all that excitement wore off in just a few months. "Marvel Rivals" lost nearly 80% of its players by May 2025. The game hit its peak concurrent player count of over 644,000 shortly after its release, but by the summer, it was clear that only about a quarter of those players would be sticking around for the long haul. "Marvel Rivals" started out as a game with mass appeal, but even though the majority of the players are gone now, the ones who remain are dedicated fans. Some other games weren't so lucky with finding their niche in 2025.

"MechaBreak" did a speedrun through the free-to-play life cycle. Amazing Seasun Games released its third-person mech combat game on July 1, 2025, and over 130,000 gamers showed up to see what all the fuss was about. In an ideal world, gamers would have found the next "Armored Core VI" waiting for them, but most players didn't think that was the case. "MehcaBreak" lost 70% of its players in 13 days, and the game hasn't really recovered.

There were two major problems plaguing "MechaBreak" when it first launched, and one of them was arguably easier to address than the other. Plenty of PC gamers had performance problems with the game, and they weren't shy about making their complaints known in their Steam reviews. Some players were also chafed by the monetization in "MechaBreak." Even though the developers made the paid content cosmetic-only, the game still took a hit for offering $30 skins in its store. 

Shortly after its debut, "MechaBreak" dropped down to Mixed review status on Steam, and it didn't bounce back. There's a ridiculous amount of competition in the free-to-play space, and with the negative reviews haunting "MechaBreak," the game couldn't pull in new players.

"Schedule 1" has all the hallmarks of a flavor-of-the-week game, which is actually part of its appeal. The premise is simple: You and your friends are trying to become the drug kingpins in the small town of Hyland Point. That means creating labs, hiring dealers, running from the police, and engaging in all sorts of other petty crimes that can make for a fun night of gaming. Developer TVGS released "Schedule 1" into early access on March 24, 2025, and by April 6 almost 460,000 people were causing chaos in Hyland Point.

The fact that "Schedule 1" lost nearly 80% of those players a month later isn't that surprising. Inexpensive party games aren't known for having a particularly long lifespan, but thousands of players discovered that "Schedule 1" is a lot deeper than its goofy premise implies. There are some really deep simulation mechanics and a surprisingly engaging factory upgrade system hiding under the surface of "Schedule 1." 

Even better, TVGS has a detailed roadmap of content it wants to add over the course of the planned two-year early access period. "Schedule 1" is one of those games that's going to keep chugging along, even if almost everyone who was there at the start is gone.

The "Monster Hunter" series has been around for a long time, and it's hard to overstate how excited fans were about 2025's "Monster Hunter: Wilds." The previous mainline game, "Monster Hunter: World," was a massive success, and players charged into "Wilds" ready for a new adventure. At release the game peaked at more than 1.3 million players on Steam alone, but players started leaving the game in droves almost immediately. Less than six months after the release of "Wilds," it had lost 98% of its players, and there weren't any signs that they'd be coming back anytime soon.

What happened to "Monster Hunter: Wilds" has been the subject of many fan debates online. Many agreed that in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience, "Wilds" simplified the "Monster Hunter" formula a bit too much. The series is known for having gratuitously detailed systems that are somewhat opaque to newcomers, and hardcore fans think the streamlining in "Wilds" went too far.

The reviews on Steam exposed another side of the "Wilds" story. Simply put, the reviews were bad, and the game's optimization on PC was the main culprit. Plenty of reviewers commented on the installment's simplified gameplay systems, but the overwhelming amount of the negative reviews on Steam called out the game's poor performance. This could mean that the "Wilds" player numbers on other platforms, which are less open to sharing data, look better — but that still wouldn't make "Wilds" a victory for the franchise.

Single-player games are almost guaranteed to lose players faster than multiplayer games, but even by that standard, the decline of "Avowed" stands out. Obsidian is the legendary developer behind "Fallout: New Vegas," and gamers were optimistic for the studio to take on a sweeping fantasy RPG. "Avowed" launched in February 2025, debuting to mixed reviews all around. Unfortunately, the gameplay and storytelling didn't offer many surprises to fans of the genre, or anyone who's played an "Elder Scrolls" game before.

Partly due to those lackluster reviews, the player count for "Avowed" on Steam never managed to impress. The game peaked at just under 20,000 concurrent players shortly after launch, but within six months, fewer than 400 people were playing the game each day — a 98% drop. For comparison, "Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2" launched in the same month as "Avowed" and lost only 49% of its players in that same amount of time. As of August 2025, more people were playing Obsidian's previous game, "The Outer Worlds," than "Avowed."

Going through this list, we've been using the phrase "lost their entire playerbase" a little metaphorically. Games can lose 90% of their players or more without disappearing completely, but now it's time to talk about a game that actually lost all of its players in 2025. "Multiversus" was a free-to-play fighting game that could be summed up as "Super Smash Brothers" meets the intellectual property of Warner Bros. Studios. The game launched in May 2024 to mixed reviews, and its peak player count on Steam was just over 150,000.

In January 2025, developer Player First Games announced that it would be taking "Multiversus" offline at the end of May. Technically the game is still playable offline, but if you're just discovering that now, it's already too late. Players in the game needed to log in during the fifth and final season to create a local save file. According to SteamDB, a few dozen people just did that, but for the rest of the world, even people who previously spent money in the game, "Multiversus" doesn't exist anymore.

The death of "Multiversus" and other games like "XDefiant" has sparked a ton of conversations online. Streamer Pirate Software lost 90% of his viewers after criticizing a movement called Stop Killing Games, so clearly players don't like seeing games vanish. Games that lose their entire playerbase are still parts of gaming history, and a huge portion of the community wants to keep these titles alive — even if no one's playing.