Ten days after eerie-sounding news for the free-to-play online game Paragon, the series' creators at Epic Games confirmed fans' looming suspicions: the game will soon shut down.

Paragon's late-Friday announcement gives the game exactly three more months of life until its servers go dark on April 26. That means the game will have barely passed the two-year mark for its lifespan after a March 2016 "pay for early access" launch. The news comes with a frank admission of the "action MOBA" game's failings and an even more frank apology to its fans.

"After careful consideration, and many difficult internal debates, we feel there isn’t a clear path for us to grow Paragon into a MOBA that retains enough players to be sustainable," the post, authored by "the Paragon team," says. "We didn’t execute well enough to deliver on the promise of Paragon. We have failed you—despite the team’s incredibly hard work—and we’re sorry."

Like other F2P games, Paragon relied on real-money microtransactions (MTX) instead of a fixed price for entry, but unlike similar games that have shut down, Epic promises to fully refund all money spent by its players. To receive this refund, players must log into Epic's help-desk system, then fill out a form with details like purchase date ranges and exact transaction amounts—so, go find those credit card receipts, Paragon fans. Epic notes that refunds will come directly from Epic, instead of from platform holders like PlayStation Network. This means Epic is likely eating the percentage that outside platforms charge for online transactions.

"Less than a dozen"

This news follows a mid-January Reddit announcement from the series' developers about the game's uneven state, and, perhaps more telling, an admission that Paragon's development had been held up in part by the enormous success of Epic's Fortnite Battle Royale mode—another free-to-play game that began racking up millions of players on PCs and consoles after a late-2017 launch.

Unconfirmed tips from Epic insiders began pouring into Ars after that article went live, and one of them alleged that Paragon was already closer to cancellation than Epic had told fans in that Reddit post. This unconfirmed tip alleged a massive reallocation of Epic manpower and resources to FNBR from other projects and that Paragon's staff had shrunk from over 100 staffers to "less than a dozen." The alleged reason for that reallocation: FNBR is doing quite well financially, in spite of being a wholly free-to-play offshoot of its standard "Save the World" mode, by selling cosmetic MTX to its players on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. Epic did not immediately respond to Ars' request for comment on these allegations.

Epic's Friday announcement confirms that Paragon will still be live and playable for the next three months, but it also warns fans to expect a less-than-ideal gameplay experience. "As the player population continues to decrease, matchmaking times and quality will further degrade."