In some sad but not surprising news, Zynga has announced that Star Wars: Hunters Season 5 will be its last, and the game will fully shut down and become unplayable by October 1st.
The current season will be extended by three weeks, with re-run events and shop bundles through April 14.
On April 15, the final Hunter will be released alongside the last update. All in-game purchases will be disabled, though a final Ranked Mode leaderboard will still be active.
The new Hunter is a Support, Tuya. As Tuya is added as part of a free content update and not a Season, they will be completely free to play. The update will also feature “a slate of additional in-game content.”
On October 1, the live servers will officially shut down. No offline mode will be offered, and Star Wars: Hunters will effectively cease to exist.
We really enjoyed Star Wars: Hunters as a hero shooter-lite when it released last summer. The 4v4 matches were smaller scale, with simpler maps and easy-to-use character abilities. Star Wars: Hunters was playable on phones, but shined particularly well on the Nintendo Switch.
Star Wars Hunters was due to launch earlier this year on PC, but that’s obviously been canceled.
The online shooter was a bit too monetized. Characters could be unlocked gradually through play, but only at a certain order. And purchasing slightly different colored skins or emotes wasn’t terribly exciting.
Plus, and probably the biggest turnoff, the Star Wars game didn’t feature any named characters. Out of the literal dozens of recognizable (and semi-recognizable) Star Wars faces, Hunters featured a bunch of “Who!?” randos. A terribly odd choice (or an unfortunate licensing limitation?) that may have damned its chances in a very crowded market.
It really was a fun game, though.
