Having started its life as a Monster Hunter-styled game, Dauntless got overhauled into a live-service action RPG back in December.
Developer Phoenix Labs has announced that the servers for its co-op RPG Dauntless will be shutting down on May 29. Taking to social media platform X to announce this, the studio has said that players will no longer be able to access Dauntless after May 29, 2025 at 11:45 PST.
No reason for the game being shut down was given, and even its Steam updates list just features a simple announcement.
“Dauntless is shutting down on May 29, 2025,” posted the studio on Steam. “Dauntless will receive no additional content or updates. The game will no longer be available to play on May 29, 2025.”
The announcement comes just a month after Phoenix Labs was hit by layoffs that affected a majority of the studio. Announcing the layoffs on LinkedIn, the studio referred to the move as “unfortunate but necessary.”
These recent layoffs came almost a year after similar layoffs from back in May 2024. At the time, the studio had also cancelled several of its unannounced projects that were in development.
As for Dauntless, the shut down of its servers comes just a few months after a major overhaul the game got back in December. Dubbed Dauntless: Awakening, the title got re-focused into a live-service game where players could progress through a new quest system.
While it was originally more of a Monster Hunter-styled game, the Awakening release changed it completely to be closer to a more standard action RPG. The move was quite controversial among the game’s player base, with many leaving negative reviews. At the time of writing, Dauntless currently sits at Mostly Negative for its recent reviews, and Overwhelmingly Negative for all reviews.
The changes made to Dauntless as part of the Awakening update were described by the studio as being part of an attempt to create a “strong foundation” on which it could continue to develop more content for the game, especially with a planned seasonal content model.
For context, the Awakening update removed several key parts of the Monster Hunter-styled gameplay loop that Dauntless was originally going for. This includes the loop of hunting down the game’s monsters, called Behemoths, for crafting materials that could be used to make new weapons and armour. The update also removed most of the weapons from the game, only to be replaced by a smaller pool of weapons.
The update also brought a complete wipe to quite a few areas of progression in Dauntless, and the studio has had to release several updates since Awakening as apologies to veteran players that have had gripes with losing all the time they had spent in the game’s previous form of progression.
While Dauntless might be getting shut down, Phoenix Labs’ other title, Fae Farm, still seems to be doing quite well. While more content hasn’t been released for the cosy farming sim, the title still sits at a review aggregate of Mostly Positive on Steam.
The future of Phoenix Labs is currently unclear, however. While Fae Farm will likely survive down the line since it hasn’t been tied into Phoenix Labs’ live-service ambitions, the shut down of Dauntless might have deeper repercussions for the studio.
Important update: Dauntless is shutting down on May 29, 2025. Dauntless will receive no additional content or updates.
Dauntless will no longer be available to play on and after May 29, 2025
