Epic pulling online services for 20+ titles including Unreal Tournament series

Epic Games has announced it’ll be turning off online services and servers for over 20 titles in the “Epic family” from 24th January next year, including multiple entries in the Rock Band, Dance Central, and Unreal Tournament series.

In a post announcing the news, Epic called affected services and servers “out-of-date”, and said it was making the move as it transitions to only supporting its Epic Online Services “with its unified friends system, voice chat features, parental controls, and parental verification features”.

The good news is most affected games will still be playable in offline solo and multiplayer modes when servers go down on 24th January. That applies to the following titles:

• 1000 Tiny Claws
• Dance Central 1-3
• Green Day: Rock Band
• Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess
• Rock Band 1-3
• The Beatles: Rock Band
• Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars
• Unreal Gold
• Unreal II: The Awakening
• Unreal Tournament 2003
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• Unreal Tournament 3
• Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition

Note all is not lost for Unreal Tournament multiplayer fans; Epic says it “plans” to bring Unreal Tournament 3’s online features back at a later date via Epic Online Services.

Epic has started the process of removing all the above titles from digital storefronts and is disabling in-game DLC purchasing as of today. It’s also pulling Mac and Linux versions of Hatoful Boyfriend and Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star from sale, as well as mobile title DropMix, and is making a number of other titles completely inaccessible to players as of 24th January: Unreal Tournament (Alpha), Rock Band Blitz, the Rock Band Companion app, and SingSpace.

SingSpace, DropMix, Dance Central, and Rock Band are, of course, all developed by much-loved rhythm-action studio Harmonix, which was acquired by Epic Games last year to “create musical journeys and gameplay for Fortnite.” Today’s raft of Harmonix shutdowns follow the news earlier this month that the developer’s ambitious music-mixing game Fuser would also be ending online support on 19th December.

Amongst all today’s announcements, Epic has also confirmed the closure of free-to-play hero collector Battle Breakers, which will cease operating and become inaccessible on 30th December. In this instance, Epic says it will automatically refund any in-game purchases made via Epic direct payment at any time within the 180 days prior to today.