Two months ago, Disney announced to widespread shock that it was shutting down both the successful Infinity line of toys-to-life games, and the in-house Avalanche studio that developed them. The entertainment giant would instead focus on licensing its IP to third-party developers.
Now, Engadget reports that there’s a timeline for the shutdown of the game—and that really means shutdown, with some versions becoming completely unplayable by March of next year.
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It all began yesterday with the end of in-game purchases for PC, mobile, and Apple TV iterations of Disney Infinity 2.0. The PC game will be pulled from the Infinity web store on September 30th, and games bought from that site will become unplayable. In-game purchases for all Windows versions of the game will end January 3rd of next year. And the Apple TV and Windows Store versions of the game disappear entirely on March 3rd.
Those who purchased the game through Valve Software’s Steam store, or for consoles like Xbox One, are a little better off. Those versions of the game will be playable, according to Gamespot, “indefinitely”—but with no online features or support.
And yes, that’s a lot of layers and a lot of different dates. Gamespot describes the shutdown as “a confusing nightmare.” It’s the kind of thing that must be frustrating, if not enraging, to players, who have poured significant sums into the figures and peripherals that helped make the game profitable before the plug was pulled.
For more on Infinity and Disney, watch our video.
But it’s not as if Disney (DIS) has much to lose from customer blowback—they’re getting out of the games business entirely. Infinity is also pretty unusual in the number of platforms it appears—pardon me, appeared— on, so presumably some of the complexity stems from a web of technology and deals that just work differently.