Sony’s team-based online shooter Unity has been removed from sale and will be taken offline on Friday, September 6, just two weeks after its August 23 release. Firewalk Studios game director Ryan Ellis said in an announcement on Tuesday that publisher Sony will offer a refund to all players who purchased the game on PC or PlayStation 5.

Sony may not have to pay out as many refunds. GameDiscoverCo analyst Simon Carless told IGN last week that he was expecting a disappointing 25,000 total sales of the game for PS5 and PC. Circana analyst Mat Piscatella, meanwhile, said that last Monday, only 0.2 percent of all active PS5 players were playing the game, making it the 147th most played title that day.

The Steam version of the game peaked at well under 700 players shortly after launch, according to SteamDB tracking. On PlayStation, popular opt-in trophy tracking site PSNProfiles recorded just over 1,300 players, Unitya relatively small number compared to popular new releases such as Star Wars Outlaws (4,300 PSNProfiles owners) and Black Myth: Wukong (16,000 owners tracked via PSNProfiles).

“While many aspects of the experience resonated with players, we also recognize that other aspects of the game and our initial launch did not resonate as we intended,” Ellis wrote.

What went wrong?

Suffice it to say that this quick shutdown is not what Firewalk or Sony had planned for the game. Less than a month ago, Ellis spoke about Unityannounced the upcoming launch by announcing a “major content drop” planned for October and the long-term potential for custom crew builds.

“We see the launch as just the beginning,” Ellis said in the August promotional post. “The beginning not only of the vision we have set for ourselves, Unity, but also the beginning of how we support and develop the game with our players.”

Unity was the first game from Firewalk Studios, which was founded in 2018 and acquired by Sony just last year. The game has been in development for around eight years, according to lead character designer Jon Weisnewski, meaning work on the title began when Blizzard’s Watch was a hot new concept rather than the aging precursor to a crowded genre.

Unity was teased at Sony’s PlayStation Showcase last May and first shown in a rough playable form this May. However, by the time it launched in August, it was clear that there was little market interest in another live-service team shooter that didn’t bring much new to the table. Unity was recommended by only 24 percent of the reviewers tracked by OpenCritic and achieved a very disappointing score of 65 on Metacritic.

UnityThe fate of is reminiscent of that of Amazon crucibleanother newcomer that struggled to find a place in a crowded shooter market. This game only managed to last six months before being canceled, although it was removed from Steam long before that death. Despite UnityDespite Firewalk’s swift closure, the door has been left only ajar for a possible revival at some point. Ellis writes that Firewalk and Sony will “determine the best path forward” and “explore options, including those that will better reach our players in the future.” Perhaps another increasingly common move toward a free-to-play model is in Unity‘s future?