Catan: World Explorers, the Pokémon Go-style game from developer Niantic, is being shut down following a year-long soft launch in certain countries.
Niantic formally announced Catan: World Explorers back in June 2020, and rolled out access over the rest of last year to Australia and New Zealand, Denmark, Switzerland and Singapore.
In a blog post published on Friday evening, Niantic broke the news that Catan would not be released further, and instead would be taken offline globally on 18th November.
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The game is now unavailable to download from app stores in countries where it had soft launched, and real-money purchases have been switched off. Any remaining in-game funds can be transferred into Pokémon Go.
“The team originally set out to build a game that turned the world into a Catan gameboard,” Niantic wrote. “We had a vision for trading, harvesting, and building up the world in seasonal play and resetting the board each month, just like you do for each new game you play at home. But trying to adapt such a well-designed board game to a global, location-based Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game was a tough challenge.