With Embracer Group’s decision to shut down Studio Onoma (the team previously known as Square Enix Montreal), it’s now been announced that four of their online-dependent mobile games will be shut down in January. This means that the rather good Deus Ex GO will no longer be available to play, at all.
The four games affected are:
- Arena Battle Champions
- Deus Ex Go
- Hitman Sniper: The Shadows
- Space Invaders: Hidden Heroes
All four games have now had in-game purchases be disabled, and they will be delisted from the App Store and Google Play Store on 1st December. Everything will then shut down on 4th January 2023, and any previously purchase in-game currency and purchases will not be refunded.
The Twitter statement ends, “On behalf of the development team, we would like to thank you for playing our games.”
Onoma will be best remembered for their ‘Go’ series of mobile games under their former name. Hitman Go, Lara Croft Go and Deus Ex Go were all fantastic puzzle game adaptations of their respective game series in the mid-2010s, though the well dried up rather quickly after that initial flurry. What this studio shut down means is that their games will all inevitably fade into obscurity, eventually becoming impossible to play as Android and iOS updates eventually make them incompatible, but these four games will be shuffled off from this mortal coil much sooner.
Embracer acquired Square Enix’s Western studios earlier this year in a deal worth $300 million. It was a shocking announcement, and for a low price considering the mass transfer of valuable IP that went alongside it, but has given fresh hope that the teams can get back to doing what they do best – namely make Deus Ex, Tomb Raider and other titles, instead of being pushed toward Marvel licenses for Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy (even though the latter game was pretty good). At the time of the acquisition there may have been some plans to make more mobile games, but Embracer have clearly had a change of heart in that regard, and they have a separate division that is devoted entirely to mobile.
Source: Twitter
