Update: Firefall Quietly Fades Into The Abyss With No Announcement

The Firefall website and Red 5 Studios website are back online, but links to the client are dead and Firefall has been removed from Steam.  

Without any announcement, press release, or notice, Firefall's website and login servers have been switched to the "off" position. Even the Red 5 Studios site fails to load.

The Firefall subreddit lays out a recent history that's a portent of what's happened today: lack of dev communication, dying forums, and unresolved authenticatior issues. But developer Red 5 studios was familiar with controversy: layoffs, missed payrolls, departures, and more major layoffs—what appeared to be the entire staff of Red 5.

Firefall has been on a steady decline, especially in recent months—an average drop from 686 players in February, 2016 to 373 in March (through SteamCharts).

To get a taste of just what has been going on behind the scenes at Firefall, read up on the cases of missed payroll, mass layoffs, and the odd story of how The9 traded half its stake in Red 5 Studios for a stake in a Cayman Islands based manufacturer of cashmere clothing. You can't make this stuff up.

It's possible that another studio will pick up Firefall one of these days, but its sordid history makes me skeptical. For now we're sorry to see the game go and hope the players and developers who invested time and energy into Firefall find a new home and wish them well.

To read more on the potential shut down, check out the game's Steam Discussion Forum.

Update: False Alarm. Firefall's servers are back up and running. Remarkable how so many people assumed the game to be dead so quickly. Perhaps it's a sign of things to come? Steamcharts shows a rapidly declining playerbase.