The REAL fatal flaw was the game's success was dependent on selling cosmetics for characters whose cartoonishly exaggerated bodies and faces that look like a dog's prolapsed asshole. Yeah, let me spend 18 dollars for this disco outfit to put on my guy who looks like a PS3 rendering of what 8 generations of inbreeding looks like. This will be the entire basis of monetization. There's no way this will shut down in less than 6 months.

If you play fighting games and are good working with frames, you could generate gamer moments. The kind that will generate every slur from the even most socially conscious pacifist.

Smacking a dude against the wall, and then tackling him after he peels off the wall, and then doing a fucked up Street Fighter combo on them until they are dead is what I like to think Jeff Bezos feels every time an Amazon warehouse employee is crushed by an unsecured palette of like dog food and sex toys: pure joy.

If you time it right, you can beat on a dude for 20 seconds completely uninterrupted and they cannot do anything about their stunned state unless you miss an attack or are too slow on input. 20 seconds feels like a lifetime to get beat up on. You could have experienced all the stages of grief -- going to therapy to disseminate the anguish -- and heal from the trauma -- in the time it takes to be let go from certain combos. It is a biblical hell unlike anything I've seen. Absolutely hilarious every time.

It is the most tilting experience to get fucked on. But the dopamine from fucking over people whose character models look like they were born in Chernobyl after 1980 - is god tier. It's probably the closest thing some gamers have felt to having someone love them.

The devs say they are shopping around for another publisher. But if I was the prospective publisher, my first move would be to grab and piledrive the art director from the top of a skyscraper onto a taxi and into a shallow kiddie pool for the crime of making people look at this motherfucking game's art style.

Rip in peace Rumbleverse. Your name was really bad and you released at the start of a long market crash, but it was fun to pulverize the hearts and minds of men into dust while looking like a clay sculpture of an aborted fetus.

Goodbye for now, sweet prince.

Rumbleverse might've been too much like a fighting game for its own good. Learning mastery of mechanics and situations is great. I love it. I am a fighting gamer. I'm not sure how many people are ready for that level of study to support a live service battle royale game, though. There was a whole system of priority levels. No option beat everything. Stronger options were more punishable (besides maybe Super, but that's time limited by meter). Much like a fighting game, there's always going to be tactics that beat newer players very easily until they learn what mistakes they're making. Being able to get into a match and not die near instantly because someone snuck up on me (unless I'm on a really tall building) is a great change to the battle royale format that melee combat offers. Getting lucky wins is far less common than it feels in a standard battle royale. I didn't vibe with the art style at first and it didn't really grow on me that much, but I can't deny that it suits the Looney Tunes style action the game offers.

Being into fighting games, I liked the idea of a battle royale similar to one crossed with that one hulk game I played at a walmart kiosk when I was a kid. It doesn't have an appealing aesthetic, it's jank as hell, it has some of the usual annoyances you'd find in a battle royale game, and I still find myself playing it for an hour or two when I have the time because despite all that there's hardly any other battle royale game that plays similar to it. The devs are good with balancing the game and communicating with the community, and I hope it goes from being a fun game that's rough around to edges to something solid. There's nothing better than uppercutting someone out the air, dodge canceling, grabbing them, diving into their body, and doing it again until their invincibility kicks in and they promptly run off after getting styled on.

EDIT: Game getting shutdown by the end of next month lol.