Battle royale dubbed 'PUBG with superpowers' shutters for the second time, and it's only been back for five months

It saddens me how numb we've all gotten to multiplayer games getting canned so soon after they launch. While there are of course huge success stories like Marvel Rivals or Arc Raiders, many are lucky to get more than a couple of years in the bank before having to shut up shop. Concord. Spectre Divide. XDefiant. The list of swiftly cut competitive games is long, and now success is more surprising than failure. That didn't deter the creators of Super People, a battle royale that shuttered in 2023, only to reappear last year as a reimagined version of the game. However, its second attempt is coming to a similar conclusion - after just five months since its revival, Super People is shutting down for a second time.

Described loosely by many as 'PUBG with superpowers,' Super People certainly shares a similar, third-person feel to Krafton's battle royale (although you can toggle to a first-person view, if you wish). That is until you deploy said superpowers. Unique abilities are attached to more than a dozen playable "super soldiers", which add another layer to the loot-and-shoot foundations.

On its first attempt, Super People actually generated quite a lot of buzz. Some hugely popular betas translated into a fairly big launch in 2022, with concurrent player counts peaking at over 45,000 people on Steam alone. However, it wasn't fresh or high-quality enough to convince most people that it's more worthy of their time than PUBG, Apex Legends, Call of Duty Warzone, Fortnite, or any of the other big battle royale names of that time. Some issues around pay-to-win monetization were also souring things. Just a few months later, developer Wonder People announced it would be shutting down, and the servers were switched off in August 2023.

Last year, Super People unexpectedly rose from the dead, announcing a closed beta and a new approach. Its game director wrote at the time, "I have found myself asking the same questions every day: 'If only we had done things a little differently'", and this was the opportunity to prove Super People could be a success. Following some testing over the summer, it relaunched in early access in September, promising more of a focus on stopping cheaters, keeping the game balanced, and a more rewarding in-game economy.

Regardless, a few thousand people showed up on Steam for its relaunch, but its player count quickly dropped to the kind of levels that make you think: 'Yeah, this isn't looking good.' Just a couple of months later in November, the developer confirmed that, despite its best efforts, Super People would be sunset for a second time on Tuesday February 3, 2026.

However, even that doesn't seem to have gone to plan. A few dozen straggling players have managed to keep playing Super People beyond that cut off date, with the servers still alive and well. Today, though, a new shut down plan was put in place.

Super People will now officially end on Monday, February 23, 2026. From today, you can issue refund requests for any currency you purchased over the last week, and from February 13 onwards, new downloads of the game from storefronts will be blocked. Then, on Monday 23, the servers will go dark.

As an added blow, Wonder People says that it won't be able to make good on its promise of a final new game mode. "First, we would like to offer our deepest apologies for not being able to release the new game mode that was under development prior to the service termination," it says. "Although we made every effort to provide a better experience until the very end, internal circumstances prevented us from delivering this content, which is deeply regrettable for our entire operations team."

Ouch. It's not like that will come as a shock now - we're technically six days on from when players thought the game would be shut down, so there was zero expectation that mode would ever really surface. But it's still disappointing to see this promise broken, even if it does affect just a handful of players.