CD Projekt Red announced this week during a 2023 Roadmap video that they would soon be ending major support for Gwent: The Witcher Card Game with both new content updates and esports tournaments set to end by the end of 2023.
Mention of this major news is noticeably absent from the official Gwent website and social channels though IGN did reach out for a comment from CD Projekt Red.
“When it comes to Gwent and its community, I would like to say that this is not the end and that we have another great year (and more) ahead of us,” Paweł Burza, CD Projekt Red’s senior communications manager, informed IGN.
While official tournaments and new card additions will cease by the end of 2023, the game itself won’t go completely offline. Instead, it seems as if the aim is to get Gwent into a perfect state by 2024 so that it can simply exist as is. The servers will remain online indefinitely for players to use and a small number of staff will remain invested in the title to deal with any major technical issues that arise.
This is actually pretty similar to what happened with Star Wars Battlefront II with its last batch of updates intended to fill out the character roster and locations to add enough content for fans to continue playing. Even though Battlefront II hasn’t received any new content for a few years now, it’s still incredibly active on both Xbox consoles and Windows PC.
Gwent originally launched in a beta testing phase in 2016 on Xbox One consoles and in 2017 on Windows PC via a Microsoft Store version of the game that featured full cross-play with the console version. Unfortunately, but the end of 2019, both of these versions shut down as the game transitioned to Android and iOS tablets and smartphones and a new PC version that was disconnected from the Xbox ecosystem.
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