Hi-Rez Studios has closed 2 games in order to focus on Smite 2

Hi-Rez Studios announced that two of its games will be shut down in February 2025, Divine Knockout, and Realm Royale Reforged. The studio announced the upcoming shutdowns less than a week after it laid off an unknown number of employees. At the time, the studio said that the cuts were needed "to ensure Hi-Rez’s long-term viability."
The Realm Royale shutdown announcement reads: "It is with a heavy-hearted heart that we at Evil Mojo Games have to inform that, as part of Hi-Rez’s recent re-org Realm Royale has been sunset and that the servers will shut down on the 17th of February 2025." "After this date, the Realm Royale game will be removed and you won't be able purchase it or any related content like DLC."

The Divine Knockout Steam page has posted a similar announcement.

Realm Royale was released in early access on Steam, in 2018, and then into open beta at the beginning of 2019. The Reforged update will arrive in 2022. It "brings back mechanics that players enjoyed from Realm Royale’s earlier stages, while building on the improvements and features players are familiar with."

The number of concurrent players was never high. A strong start with more than 105,000 players when the game launched quickly dropped to a few thousands, then several hundreds. According to SteamDB, the number of concurrent players over the past 24 hour period was only 402.

Divine Knockout arrived in December 2022 but did not fare well. Its review rating was "mixed", and its concurrent players haven't exceeded 100 since February. The in-game content of both games was "effectively" freed up earlier this year. However, the change had no significant impact on player numbers.

Hi-Rez announced layoffs in early August, saying that it had "decided to focus our efforts exclusively on Smite 2 outside of small teams providing light updates for Paladins or Smite 1."

Smite 2 entered early access in August but is still lagging behind its predecessor in terms of concurrent player counts: Its peak 24-hour player count was 1,974, while Smite had 7,285 players. As we noted in 2022, concurrent player numbers aren’t everything. Games are often declared “dead” when these numbers naturally decrease with time. It does seem that Hi-Rez is struggling to find a hit since Smite & Paladins.