PS3's SoulCalibur: Lost Swords Shutting Down This Year

PlayStation 3 free-to-play fighting game Soulcalibur: Lost Swords is coming to an end.

Bandai Namco has announced that Lost Swords, which has seen more than 2 million downloads, will shut down for good on November 30. The game didn't have a long life, as it only launched in April 2014.

Polygon reports that the sale of consumable items will end on September 30, while all in-game item sales will be discontinued on October 30. The game itself, meanwhile, will close at 3 AM EDT on November 30.

Not only does Lost Swords differ from its predecessors in terms of its business model, but the game also ditches the multiplayer mode that was so central to past entries in the series. It is single-player only.

Explaining this decision earlier this year, producer Masaaki Hoshino explained that it came down to the game's "pay-to-win" model.

"The reason that we went single-player... well, originally, we were thinking about having a multiplayer option," he said. "But because we're going with a pay-to-win model, we were worried that by having online multiplayer, for all the new users that would be coming in experiencing the game for the first time, they might be immediately deterred by fighting against opponents who had superior equipment and gear--and we didn't want to have that kind of negative impact on new players."