One of the smoldering disappointments of the COVID era for me was the collapse of Torchlight Frontiers, the Torchlight MMORPG that Perfect World Entertainment’s Echtra Games was once building. Originally announced back in 2018, the game gave up on even being an MMO in 2020 and scaled down into a title that eventually became Torchlight III, which totally bombed at launch with just a bare handful of updates into 2021, at which point Zynga bought Echtra Games.

Of course, Perfect World Entertainment no longer exists, having been bought up and largely disassembled by Embracer, and now, Echtra Games is dead too.

IGN reported this week that Zynga is closing the Max Schaefer-led Echtra entirely and apparently laying off its 60-odd workers, before it could even reveal the game it’s been working on for the last four-ish years. PWE retained Runic and the Torchlight IP, so it wouldn’t have been directly related, but given Schaefer’s history, we’d say it’s safe to assume it would’ve been a close kin to the roguelikes he helped make famous.

As an added bummer for this post, Torchlight III remained with PWE as it was absorbed into Gearbox/Embracer, and the game continues to linger on, averaging fewer than 30 concurrent players a month – a far cry from what Torchlight Frontiers once hoped for.