Dirty Bomb developer Splash Damage recently announced that active development on the game is being wound down. The servers will remain up for the foreseeable future, but no major updates will be released from here on out.
Dirty Bomb Shutdown
Splash Damage began developing Dirty Bomb way back in 2013 before launching its open beta in 2015. The game remained in open beta until this past August when Splash Damage finally released the 1.0 public build. The release of the 1.0 build led to a spike of nearly 4,000 concurrent players on Steam. However, the concurrent player average was never super high after the open beta launch. In fact, aside from the August spike, Dirty Bomb’s concurrent player count never rose above 1,000 since this past April.
If the name Splash Damage sounds familiar, there’s good reason for that. Splash Damage is the same studio that developed Brink, the heavily-marketed 2011 shooter game that infamously flopped. The studio also developed the unique competitive multiplayer component for 2013’s Batman: Arkham Origins. In its statement, Splash Damage didn’t cite any one reason for Dirty Bomb’s closure. There were simply just some challenges the studio couldn’t overcome:
“After regaining publishing rights for DB nearly two years ago, we staffed up a load of developers and tried our best to deliver a Dirty Bomb experience that would be feature-rich with tons of new content, while maintaining its great gameplay feel & balance. Unfortunately, despite all the added time and resources, there were some challenges we couldn’t overcome, and we were not able to make DB the success that we hoped it could be. The bottom line is that we can’t financially justify continuing to work on the game we love.”
If you’re looking for another competitive shooter to play in lieu of Dirty Bomb, there are plenty of options. Be sure to check out Call of Duty Black Ops 4 or Fortnite to name a few.