The long-running game Battle Nations (Free) is being shut down by Z2 (owned by King, which in itself is owned by Activision Blizzard), as are all the other Z2 games in their portfolio, including Metalstorm: Aces (pulled from the App Store), Metalstorm: Online (Free), Nitro (Free), and Trade Nations (pulled from the App Store). The games are all shutting down their in-app purchases this week, with servers being shut down in late September. The player base is decidedly not happy. Some games haven’t had announcements in years, so people are grumpy but there’s not a lot left. Battle Nations‘ shutdown thread in the official forums is pretty much a microcosm of the internet. After the carefully-crafted statement, the first comment is someone being really angry and vowing to never spend money on the developer ever again; the second post includes a repurposed Harambe meme.

It was clear that these games were largely abandoned – Battle Nations hadn’t been updated in a year, Metalstorm: Online went 3 years without updates! But still, for the players who invested large amounts of time and money into these games, it’s sad to see them get shut down. Such is the drawback of the age of games as a service. Someday Clash of Clans (Free) will get shut down, too. And the sun will consume the Earth in flame, too.