Nintendo is no longer going to be supporting the multiplayer component of Tomonobu Itagaki’s Devil’s Third, the third-person shooter for the Wii U. The game didn’t sell particularly well and the multiplayer wasn’t maintaining enough of an audience to warrant keeping the lights on.
According to MCV UK Devil’s Third’s multiplayer servers will have the lights turned off on December 28th. This will apparently be a decision that affect’s the game’s worldwide servers.
The microtransaction cash shop for the third-person shooter will go kaput next week on June 29th.
The game has had a really rough time on the market, and it’s not surprising that Nintendo would make this decision for Devil’s Third.
Personally, I thought Devil’s Third was a nice throwback to the third-person shooters from the OG Xbox era. There were plenty of macho, no-holds-barred shooters from back then that just let it all hang out, and Devil’s Third was one of those games. The Hideo Kojima-style story with an extra layer of cheese and the over-the-top, B-movie quality cut-scenes helped make keep the game an entertaining romp. The melee combat was okay and the shooting was par the course for most third-person shooters.
However, journalists absolutely hated Devil’s Third and the game failed to find a decent enough audience, resulting in the game selling poorly. The troubles for Itagaki’s game actually started as far back as 2012 when THQ was going through a financially tumultuous time, resulting in them dropping various games from their publishing slate, which included Devil’s Third, as reported by Prima Games.
The main character, Ivan, was pretty cool and the mix of melee weapons and gun-based shooting mechanics was nice divergence from the typical setup of having only one or the other. Sadly, Devil’s Third was a game that has released in an era where niche ultra-violent games starring white guys will get rolled on hard by the media or completely ignored. Had this game come out a decade ago it probably would have sold decently on the Xbox 360 and PC.
