Splash Damage ends development of its team-based shooter Dirty Bomb

Developer Splash Damage will no longer update its team-based shooter Dirty Bomb, it has announced.

"The bottom line is that we can’t financially justify continuing to work on the game we love," it said in a post on the game's official website, adding that it was "not able to make Dirty Bomb the success that we hoped it could be".

The shooter entered open beta way back in 2015, but its 1.0 version only came out in August.

It was, by all accounts, a fun, fast-paced game: when Evan played the beta he called it a "Frankenstein of your favorite shooters", with elements of TF2, CS:GO and Battlefield. At the time, it was pulling in 13,000 concurrent players, whereas now, according to SteamSpy, it barely reaches a peak of 1,000 a day (as we know, SteamSpy is no longer the most accurate yardstick, but it gives you a rough idea of the change).

Splash Damage will release a couple of bug fix builds in the coming weeks as planned, and will continue to keep official servers open "as long as the player count supports it". It won't get around to releasing all the mercenaries it had planned, which means anyone that bought the All Merc Pack DLC will be refunded—the money should automatically appear in your Steam wallet.

Free mercenary rotations will continue, and the game will still hold "simple events", like weekend login bonuses. You can read the full FAQ on the news here.

Thanks, Eurogamer.

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.