A Changing Market
Anyone who got their hands on it during its Early Access in March of 2016 would agree that Epic had created a unique experience. Fast and free movement and heavy emphasis on skill based targeting took the best parts of Unreal and SMITE, and slapped them together in this sci-fi/fantasy hybrid world. When it went fully free-to-play that August, Paragon enjoyed a steady growing wave of players on PC and PS4, looking to experiment in the genre that had mostly turned them off for the first.
But by 2016, the MOBA craze had ended in North America. The established leaders in the genre were stoic to market forces, and competing against them seemed like a fool?s errand. Thanks to Overwatch, the hero shooter was the new games as a service craze. 2017 would find that paradigm upended again with the completely ludicrous, runaway success of Playerunknown?s Battlegrounds. PUBG was so popular that Epic converted their other current project, the beleaguered survival shooter, Fortnite, into its own PUBG clone. This move allowed it to find its own unbridled success. In the wake of these seemingly immovable market forces and existential factors, it would be safe money to bet that Paragon was dead on arrival. That its impending closure this April was the only outcome for a MOBA not named Dota 2 or League of Legends. While that may be true, the closure is further colored by the dramatic collapse of the relationship between the game’s developers and the playing communit...