MOBA Super Monday Night Combat to shut down because of new EU privacy laws

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Making the game compliant with GDPR would cost too much.

Free-to-play MOBA Super Monday Night Combat is shutting down for good next month because of changes to EU privacy laws, developer Uber Entertainment has announced. The game is now gone from Steam, so unless it's already in your library you won't be able to play it, and even if it is, the servers will go offline on May 24. 

The developer said that the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which was approved in 2016 and will be enforced from May 25, is to blame. GDPR aims to hand individuals more control over their data online, and companies that fail to comply will be met with heavy fines. It's the same regulation that made Steam change its privacy settings earlier this month, which caused havoc for SteamSpy.

Uber Entertainment told Polygon that the game's current multiplayer system is not GDPR compliant, and that changing the system would cost more money than is budgeted for the game. In a Steam post, the developer said that it would give all active players $10,000 of in-game currency to spend on one last hurrah—details of how to claim are in the Steam post linked above.

As a six-year-old game with a low player count, I doubt many people will be devastated by the news. However, it'll be interesting to see just how wide-reaching the impact of GDPR is. This week, WarpPortal announced that all games running on its service—including MMORPG Ragnarok Online—will also be shut down in most of Europe because of GDPR. How many more games will be affected?

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.