Disintegration's multiplayer servers are getting shut down just five months after launch

This really fell apart

Disintegration might be setting a record, but it's not the kind of record you want to set. In November, publisher Private Division is shutting down Disintegration's multiplayer servers.

That's alarmingly quick. The game just launched on June 16. Three months later, it's so dead that the publisher is already pulling the plug. A quick look at the Steam data estimates that Disintegration had a three-player concurrent peak on PC within the last 24 hours. Three. Over the past month, it got as high as 27 players. The all-time high came in July when 539 people were playing at once -- although, that was probably the product of a free-to-play weekend.

It's an awful precedent to set, as Disintegration is a paid-for $50 game. In his review, Chris noted that the singleplayer campaign was decent enough, but that it was clearly an appetizer for the multiplayer mode. Soon enough, there will be no multiplayer to play. Offline singleplayer will remain available, but that likely won't be enough consolation to people who purchased a $50 game expecting it to work longer than half of a year.

In a statement, the publisher and developer said "While our player base showed interest in the singleplayer campaign, the game unfortunately struggled to build a significant audience necessary for a compelling multiplayer experience. After weighing options, we have collectively made the decision to sunset the multiplayer support."

Disintegration's multiplayer dies on November 17. Private Division has started the removal process by shutting down the in-game store so that players can no longer buy microtransaction-type stuff. The game itself is still being sold, although the price has been dropped to $40 on Steam.

Anyone who picked up Disintegration at launch has been burned for supporting a game with a neat design premise. I'd say they deserve a full refund, but there probably aren't enough of them around to raise a fuss.