The steady drip of always-online games going dark carries on. Five titles are losing their Xbox servers before the month is out, and while none of them are current headliners, a couple are the kind of game people quietly still boot up. Here's the list, with dates pulled from publisher notices and rounded up by Pure Xbox.
The dates
NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 and WWE 2K Battlegrounds, both from 2K, go offline on August 20. Warface: Clutch follows on August 25, with its developer calling the decision to sunset the game a hard one to make. Then EA Sports pulls the plug on both NHL 22 and NHL 23 on August 31, and that's the one likely to sting, because plenty of people never upgraded past them.
The bit that always stinks
Local and offline modes usually survive a server shutdown, so you won't lose the game entirely. But online play, the leaderboards, and in some cases chunks of the progression are just gone. That's the standing cost of building games around always-on servers: the publisher decides when your game stops being a game. If one of these is in your rotation, treat this as your notice to squeeze the last few matches in before the end of the month.
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