6 March 2026

Ambitious Fantasy Game is Shutting Down Only 2 Months After Its Full Launch on Steam

By newsgame

Notorious Studios CEO Chris Kaleiki announced that the developers’ game, Eldegarde, will be shutting down indefinitely on March 31. Eldegarde launched on Steam on January 21 and is joining a growing list of sunsetting games in what’s turning out to be an unfortunate trend in the first few months of 2026.

Eldegarde (formerly Legacy: Steel and Sorcery) is an extraction PvPvE shooter where players choose from one of six classes—warrior, wizard, priest, paladin, rogue, or hunter. It features action combat melded with light MMO elements. Players fight skeletons, goblins, wolves, bosses, and other players to gather loot and resources to extract with. It’s developer Notorious Studios’ first game after being founded in 2023 by former World of Warcraft developers. This week has been a rough one for live-service games, with Eldegarde‘s shutdown announcement coming just days after the controversial hero-based shooter Highguard revealed that it is shutting down in March.

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Eldegarde is Shutting Down on March 31

Notorious Studios CEO Chris Kaleiki announced Eldegarde‘s shut down on the game’s discord server, but shared a longer statement on Steam. The game had just entered its full 1.0 release on January 21, a mere two months ago. Eldegarde was in early access for just under one year prior to its full release. In his statement, Kaleiki said the game hadn’t reached enough player engagement to be financially sustainable long term for the studio. As such, the game is no longer for sale on Steam and the servers will be taken offline on March 31. Refunds will be provided for players who purchased the game within the last two weeks.

“While our team at Notorious is incredibly proud of the quality, experience, and passionate community we built with Eldegarde, it unfortunately didn’t gain enough traction to sustain the studio financially long term. The game will no longer be for sale on Steam, but it will remain online and playable until March 31st,” Kaleiki said in the statement.

Unfortunately, it also sounds like Notorious Studios has lost some of the talent behind the game. In the statement, Kaleiki said members of the studio have moved on to the next step in their careers, but a handful of developers have volunteered to convert the game into an offline state. Hopefully, that means players will still be able to play the game, albeit without the PvP elements, down the road. Kaleiki said that this would be a challenging endeavor. Players shouldn’t expect to be able to play the game quickly after its servers shut down on March 31, but should keep an eye on the developers’ socials for more news. It’s a small piece of good news during a time when publishers like EA are shutting down multiple games at once, cutting off access entirely to players.

It’s always sad to hear about a game being shut down after not meeting expectations, particularly when it’s a developer’s passion project. It’s hard to say what makes players latch on to extraction shooters like Arc Raiders and Marathon, or what it takes to launch a successful live-service game in 2026. Highguard was surprise announced at last year’s The Game Awards, providing a massive launching pad for the game. It had nearly 100,000 players on Steam when it was first released, yet it’s shutting down just 45 days later. While Eldegarde did not reach as many players at launch, peaking at 3,698 players according to SteamDB, it did garner some positive word of mouth among players and streamers.

It’s also not only games that have gotten the axe in recent weeks. Myrient announced that it would be shutting down as well. Myrient is a non-profit website that hosts over 390 TBs of video game files. In the digital age of games and live-service models, the database has played an important role in video game conservation. Given its shutdown, it hits just a little bit harder that the Notorious Studio developers have opted to try to preserve Eldegarde.