Photo: Jerritt Clark/Getty Images
Epic Games has had a busy last quarter of the year. They launched a digital games store, becoming the first legitimate contender to Steam in a good while. In that store, they attracted a host of exclusives from some of the biggest indie game designers around. All this and they’re still churning out updates for Fortnite, the gaming phenomenon that has kids flossing across the country. However, before all this, the modern Epic Games was known for Infinity Blade. This landmark series of mobile games pushed the phone platform to its limits and still retains a dedicated fanbase. Epic didn’t do much to keep them happy this past week.
At the beginning of the week, Epic pulled the Infinity Blade games from stores, citing the lack of a team that could support them on an ongoing basis. Developer Chair Entertainment is hard at work with J.J. Abrams on Spyjinx, and the rest of the company is pretty much solely focused on Fortnite. Several mobile-focused sites mourned the loss of the trilogy, as they truly were a shining example of what gaming could be on phones.
Of course, iPhone games are particularly difficult to keep up support for, as the constant updates to the platform make older games obsolete. The only way for these games to remain viable is to update them twice a year, which is seemingly not viable to even the biggest of publishers in 2018.
More like infinite moolah: Gamer Makes $500K A Month Playing ‘Fortnite’
However, it wasn’t the end of the week for fans of the mobile slasher series. Players of Fortnite were greeted by the Infinity Blade sword becoming a Mythic item drop in games at the start of Season 9. It was a powerful item, so powerful that some fans found it overpowered. The developers eventually agreed, and after several days of rough games, the update-defining item was “vaulted” and removed from the game.
Heya folks,
We messed up and rolled out the Infinity Blade overpowered / without good counters, especially in the end game.
The Infinity Blade has been Vaulted and we are re-evaluating our approach to Mythic items.
Thanks for calling us out on this!
— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) December 14, 2018
Can’t stop won’t stop: The 15 Most Addictive Video Games of 2018
So, not only do fans of Infinity Blade have to go without the games on new phones going forward, but they can’t even use the tribute weapon in Epic’s smash hit. Here’s hoping that the insanely profitable company comes to their senses and ports the games to a platform more suited to preservation. Those touchscreen controls sure would work wonders on Switch.
