Gigantic, the free-to-play MOBA-hero shooter crossover that launched in mid-2017, will come to the end of its run on July 31. Publisher Perfect World said the game enjoyed "outstanding support" from an "awesome community," but in the end that community wasn't big enough to keep the wheels turning.

"Discontinuing Gigantic was not an easy decision. The game is a unique and exciting experience that captured many hearts and minds. Unfortunately, it did not resonate with as many players as we’d hoped," Perfect World wrote.

"Over the last several months, the teams at Motiga and Perfect World looked into viable options to sustain Gigantic. However, the current state of the game has restricted options for further progress and relevant content updates, and delivering basic features while also fixing long-standing issues was more complicated than expected. Despite our best efforts, we were unable to find an impactful solution that would help Gigantic break through in a crowded market."

One of the reasons that Perfect World found the ongoing development of Gigantic so challenging could be the fact that it pulled the plug on the developer, Motiga, in November 2017. Motiga CEO Chris Chung said at the time that "Gigantic was not making enough revenue" to justify the studio's continued existence, and while a small number of developers were kept around to continue supporting the game, the writing was clearly on the wall.

Rubies and Hero Packs can no longer be purchased, but all Heroes will be free for the remainder of Gigantic's uptime, including the newest addition, T-Mat, who was just introduced in the January update. Any existing Rubies and Crowns will remain in player accounts for use in the now-discounted Gigantic Shop, and currency will be awarded in-game as usual.

The closure, announced less than a week after Epic confirmed the coming shutdown of Paragon, is an unfortunate end to a game that faced numerous challenges during its development period and showed real promise when it finally released. But even then we noted that "it's not clear if the sacrifices of its developers will ever pay off," and the player numbers on Steam tell the tale: The average concurrent player count has been in the low hundreds since October 2017, and currently sits at just 167.