Killer Queen Black’s Online Play Will Shut Down From November 30, 2022

Today, we have some unfortunate news for Killer Queen Black players who love to duke it out online with others.

The game’s developer Liquid Bit has announced that its online component will be shutting down from 30 November 2022 onward. This is due to the game’s online play being built around the Amazon GameSparks service, which was retired by Amazon recently.

While the team behind the game had been trying to migrate the game’s online play to another service, this would have required an “almost complete rewrite” of Killer Queen Black. Sadly, this option was not considered practical by Liquid Bit.

Here is the full message about the shutdown below:

Dear Killer Queen Black Players and Friends,

It’s with a heavy heart that we’re announcing that after three amazing years, KQB will be going offline on November 30’th, 2022.

This is not something that was planned or foreseen. KQB was built on top of Amazon GameSparks, the service that provides the backend functionality for our game. Unfortunately, Amazon decided to shut down this service on September 30’th. We moved mountains and spent a treasure to migrate to a different provider, but unfortunately, the task amounted to an almost complete rewrite of the game, and that’s just not in the cards for Liquid Bit at this time. We’re working on plans to open-source the game, and hopefully, with some luck and support, it will rise again in the future.

We know that this comes as a shock and disappointment to many of you that have spent so much time and energy playing our game and making the community the great place that it is. We can assure you that we are just as disappointed as you are.

Please know that we did everything possible to keep the online component alive – unfortunately, it was just out of our capability as an indie developer. We did, however, secure a two-month extension from Amazon to use the service until November 30’th so our league play could conclude uninterrupted.

Liquid Bit is marching on, and we’re continuing to build out our new title, which we hope to share very soon. Rest assured, we will make sure issues of this nature are not able to thwart our production or shut down our future online games again.

It’s been a wild run and I am grateful for everyone’s support. Thank you. – Matt Tesch

What do you think? Will be getting in some final online rounds of Killer Queen Black before it shuts down for good? Feel free to share below.