Here we are on Thursday with the sun shining brightly outside and the buds beginning to pop on the trees. What better time to say goodbye to an old favorite?
Well, an old favorite of mine, anyway. Not, I imagine, of anyone else.
Who remembers Dawnlands? Hands up...
No-one? Okay, then.
There are fifteen posts tagged "Dawnlands" here and most of them are all about my time with the game, which ranks sixth in my Steam library by hours played at 105. The last time I wrote about that was on April 29, 2024, when I made a brief visit in the wake of the close-down of another of my favorite games of recent years, Noah's Heart.
Back then, as I wrote, "I decided to spend some time in a game that's still around - although, if I was going to bet on it, not for much longer." I was right about that, although in the event Dawnlands hung on a while longer than I expected. It's still up as I write this but the servers are due to go down for good on 27 March.
Not that you'd know unless you were paying very close attention indeed. I only found out because I happened to see a passing comment about the closure when I was looking for something entirely different. I didn't get an email or see a news item about it on Steam. There's been no word at all from Seasun Games on the platform since December 2023. I had to go to the official website and hunt around until finally I found this closure notice under the News tab.
There's no mention of the shut-down on the Steam Store page, where you can still download the game. Since it's free to play that's not such a problem as it might be but even so, you'd think they might want to warn potential new players of the extremely short time they'll have to enjoy that new game they just downloaded.
Except, of course, there aren't likely to be any new players. That's why the game is closing down. Lack of interest.
It's not that no-one's playing. Dawnlands isn't a dead game, or at least not for a couple of weeks or so yet. Steam records a fairly consistent population over the last year of between fifty and a hundred players, mostly hovering around eighty. There are plenty of games with a lot fewer people playing than that.
Still, it's obviously not a viable population for a commercial product, especially one that relies on micro-transactions to keep it going. Then again, Steam isn't the only way to play. Dawnlands is available on mobile devices via both Android and iOS and there's a stand-alone installer for Windows you can download directly from the publisher.
All of those platforms together must not add up to enough income to keep the servers running, or so I have to assume. It's always possible the company has just lost interest in maintaining it but I imagine if it wasn't costing them money they'd have just let it run silent as they have for the last two years.
All of which raises the question of why Dawnlands ever needed to be a live service game in the first place. As Tyler F. M. Edwards asked in his MassivelyOP piece on the about-to-launch horse mystery MMO Equinox Homecoming, "Why is this a multiplayer live service game?"
Dawnlands doesn't even have the excuse that it's trying to be an MMO. You can play up to four-person co-op or solo. There's absolutely no need for it to be a live service game at all, other than to support the business model. It's cartoon Valheim and Valheim has an offline mode. So could Dawnlands - if it was buy-to-play.
Here's the thing. All of these solo and co-op open-world survival-and-craft games, of which there must by now be hundreds, if not thousands, would work perfectly well, not to say better, as buy-to-play titles. It's perfectly possible to be successful using that model as we've seen with Enshrouded, which fully supports offline play.
It's also possible to retro-fit an offline version onto the business model if the live service route fails, as happened with Nightingale. The conversion was a bit clunky, sure, but it works. But Nightingale was also buy-to-play.
With a free-to-play model, though, there's very little incentive for a developer to offer any kind of local solution. Why would they? You get what you paid for and you paid for nothing which is exactly what you're left with when the servers go down. Seems fair.
All of which is a bit notional, if I'm honest. It makes little difference to me whether the games I play persist or don't any more. I rarely go back and never for long.
Still. the collector in me would love to have a copy of the game stored safely away and the nostalgist would like to be sure he could drop back in whenever he felt like taking another look around the old place. It's better to have and don't need than to need and don't have, as Don Covay used to say, even if by "need" you mean indulge the occasional whim.
Realistically, I would never have played the game in any meaningful fashion again even if the servers stayed up until doomsday. I last logged into Dawnlands on 27 September 2025, when all I did was wander about aimlessly for a few minutes, soaking up the ambience, before logging out and forgetting all about it. If the game wasn't about to close down, I certainly wouldn't be here writing about it now.
The same applies to any number of titles. Looking at my Steam library, it's unlikely I'll ever again spend a serious amount of time with any of the dozen most-played games I see there. I do, occasionally, log in to a few - Valheim, Nightingale, Once Human, Bless Unleashed, Rift, New World... but the only ones I might ever spend any significant time with again are the MMORPGs and then only if something new happens there.
MMORPGs do need to be both online and Live Service. They rely on lots of players sharing the same space and they stagnate without a continuing stream of new content. When either or, worse, both of those stop, there probably isn't much of an alternative to closing the whole thing down, at least as far as the official, money-making operation goes. They may live on in an emulated afterlife but in most cases only as museum pieces.
For MMORPGs there's also no real prospect of any kind of offline port. It would be nice for nostalgia but without a population much of the content would be meaningless.
For most other genres, though, and particularly for single-player or co-op titles, there seems to be no good reason, other than money, why they ever needed an online connection or had to be played on someone else's hardware in the first place. I don't generally have a lot of sympathy with the Stop Killing Games initiative but the evidence against both the Live Service and the Online Connection Required models does seem to be piling up now. It's being applied indiscriminately and it doesn't suit many games at all.
I'm a long-time advocate of the better free-to-play payment models but I'd have to acknowledge that what you gain on the ease of access roundabout you often lose on the long-term stability swings. The F2P revolution has meant I've been able to play far more games than I otherwise would but also that many of them are no longer available to me now.
Which begs the question would I have wanted them to be? Would I even ever have played most of them at all?
For example, had Dawnlands been a buy-to-play title retailing at $30, would I have bought it? Almost certainly not. There are dozens of better games at lower prices on my wishlist and I'm not ponying up for those.
There must be scores of games where I spent many entertaining sessions that I would never have played at all, had I had to pay at the door. It renders the question of how much longer those games would have lasted had they charged an entry fee entirely moot, at least for me.
On balance, I think I prefer to have more new games available at zero cost, even in the knowledge they may only hang around for a year or two. Why pay just for the security of knowing I could play them forever when I know I'd only play for a while and then never think of them again?
More to the point, how many would I buy anyway? Even the really good ones stay on the shelf. I still haven't bought Enshrouded, for example, even though I played and enjoyed the demo and keep reading about what a good game it is and how it's getting better all the time.
I guess the flip to that coin is that I can buy Enshrouded any time I feel flush. And having bought it, I can play it for as long as it interests me. It feels like a very theoretical advantage all the same. That's exactly what happened with Nightingale and am I ever going to play that again? I doubt it.
I don't have a good answer to this one. It seems like there are strong arguments on both sides. I guess the ideal would be for the games to be both free-to-play and offline but that's a pipe dream. No-one's making any money with that.
As for Dawnlands, I'll remember it fondly. I had some good times there. Like some holiday I took years ago, though, if I want to relive the experience I have my screenshots and the posts I wrote about it. I'm happy for it to remain a pleasant memory and I'm glad I had the chance to enjoy it while it lasted.
If anyone else had it in mind to get around to playing some day - tough. You missed your chance.
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