If you loaded up the App Store around 2:00 PM central yesterday when the new App Store features come up, you may have noticed that Tactile Wars (Free) was the Editor’s Choice this week. The game’s been in soft launch for a while now, and has just now gone global, but it seems like that soft launch didn’t prepare developer Ankama and publisher DOFUS for the game’s launch, as the big feature caused the servers to not work. So Apple unpersoned the game – it’s no longer featured and it no longer has its prominent Editor’s Choice banner. If you search for the game on the App Store, it still shows its Editor’s Choice label, but the game isn’t there any more on the front page.

As of writing on Friday afternoon, the game still doesn’t work – it said at one point that the servers were down, but now the game just kind of sticks around at a loading screen for a while before crashing. I feel bad for the developers – you only really get one chance to launch, and because they got a superstar feature, their game is missing out on a prime time to get players and start making revenue. Yet, the lesson is clear: if you’re a developer making a big server-driven game, you better be ready to scale for a mass influx of players at once. They weren’t, and are paying the cost.