Bandai Namco's Rise Of The Incarnates Is Already Shutting Down

Bandai Namco today announced that it will soon be closing the servers to Rise of the Incarnates, its free-to-play online battle game. What makes this news so shocking is that the game only went live a few months ago.

Announced today through the Rise of the Incarnates Steam page, Bandai Namco’s online fighting experiment has apparently proven to be a failure. Launching on July 1 of this very year, Rise of the Incarnates has officially been labeled DOA, with servers set to close by Dec. 15. For those of you having trouble with the match, that means that the game was live for less than three months before Bandai Namco decided to pull the plug.

To help encourage players to keep on battling through the next two months, the announcement also states that, starting today, all characters within the game will be made available for free. Like with similar free-to-play games, folks who played the game could either purchase new characters with real cash or play with free characters long enough to earn in-game credits and buy them that way. It’s a solid system that’s worked fine for games like War Thunder, World of Tanks and Warframe, but apparently it didn’t have deep enough hooks to keep an active community growing in Rise of the Incarnates.

In case you were thinking this would be a good time to jump into the game and enjoy all of the free characters through December, it’s important to note that you can no longer actually add Rise of the Incarnates to your Steam library. If you missed out on the game, you’re fresh out of luck. If it’s already in your library, consider these next 60 days a sort of “thank you” from the publisher for giving Rise a try.

For those of you who are playing the game, however, you can expect other in-game items to see a reduction in price. Everything from customization items to boosts will be cheaper starting today, so feel free to throw a few extra bucks Bandai Namco’s way if you’ve found yourself enjoying Rise of the Incarnates.

Again, these types of closures aren’t unheard of in the free-to-play market, but they don’t usually occur so quickly after the game launches. We don’t have information on sales figures at this time, but we figure they had to be pretty abysmal for the game to get the axe with record speed.