An Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S game that was previously locked behind a purchase is now 100% free to download and keep on the Microsoft Store. This is a permanent change, and not because the game is going free-to-play, but because the developer wants to give it away for free now that it is moving on to future projects.
More specifically, Double Eleven — a developer and publisher — has released what it has called the “final update” for its 2024 first-person shooter, Blindfire. And it’s the final update because ultimately the game has failed to sustain operations, so the company needs to move on to something new. Rather than shut the game down and delist it as every other publisher would do, the studio has decided to make the game free, permanently, and has promised to keep servers on indefinitely.
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Free First-Person Shooter
For those unfamiliar with Blindfire, it is an online multiplayer first-person shooter set in pitch-black arenas, which means players must rely on sound and an arsenal of gadgets to make their way around the arena and survive.
Is it any good? Well, on the Xbox Store, it has a 3/5 star rating after 232 user reviews. And this more or less lines up with its ratings elsewhere. For example, it has a 69% approval rating on Steam and a 70 rating on the PlayStation Store. Meanwhile, it does not have a Metacritic score because until this past week, it was in early access.
How many active players it has, we do not know, but it obviously was not enough to continue operations. That said, with this new change, it being made free, now is probably the ideal time to jump in for the first time or revisit it with a surge of new players likely.
As for why Double Eleven is doing this, it says it simply does not want to pull the plug on a game the team worked so hard on and is proud of. How it’s going to pay for servers, we do not know. There are in-game purchases, but there always have been. Nothing about the game’s model has changed. In other words, it’s not going free-to-play to try and make money this way. It is simply free now. Of course, if there is a huge wave of players, maybe the studio will revisit its decision to end support for it, but this seems unlikely at this point.
All of that said, and as always, feel free to leave a comment or two letting us know what you think, or join the video game conversations happening over on the ComicBook Forum.
