Epic starts to doubt the future of Paragon and addresses the community

Paragon players may be wondering what’s going on behind the scenes at Epic and today they posted a progress update.

The success of Fortnite has been a huge surprise and Epic has had to split teams to support that game’s success. This has had an impact on their other game in development, the excellent MOBA Paragon. Now Epic is starting to doubt whether they can continue to support Paragon which is extremely disappointing because many of the problems with the game are of their own making and lack of action on key issues.

The full statement reads:

We know you have a lot of questions about the future of Paragon. We care deeply about this community and we know this is important to you, so here’s a summary of where we are.

Going from Legacy to Monolith to a new card system and all of the changes in-between, our efforts have always been focused on growing the game. While each of these incarnations has been beloved by a core community, none has been large enough to achieve mainstream success. This, combined with the humbling success of Fortnite has caused us to question if we have a good path to grow Paragon and make it thrive.

Work on Paragon continues. V.45 ships this week with both Hero and Card balance as well as stability improvements.

However, progress has been slower lately for two reasons: First, the team’s time is split between immediate improvements and longer-term efforts, so there’s less visible progress. Second, a number of Paragon team members jumped onto Fortnite to help sustain the game as it has grown far larger than anything in Epic’s past.

Here inside Epic, we’re talking about the future of Paragon in pretty much the same terms as you’re talking about it. The core challenge is that, of new players who try Paragon, only a small number continue to play regularly after a month. Though Paragon has evolved, no iteration has yet achieved that magical combination of ingredients that make for a sustainable game. (As an aside, the problem isn’t marketing or how to make money with Paragon. We have good ideas that would solve those problems if we can find a way to make Paragon grow.)

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be figuring out if and how we can evolve Paragon to achieve growth and success, and trying some things internally. In the meantime, Paragon’s release cadence will be slower.

We welcome your thoughts on what we should do. Like you, the team is deeply passionate about Paragon. Like you, we would love to find a path that works. And like the community at large, we are not all in agreement on what could place Paragon on a fundamentally better path for all.

We will always be transparent with the community, and this is where we are right now. As we have more information, we will share it with you.

As someone who plays Paragon daily, this is extremely disappointing to hear and I’ll discuss this is greater length in another update shortly.

Update: Our follow-up article is now live.  Can Epic Save Paragon? We look at the MOBA’s future and what’s going wrong.