King of Meat shuts down this week, so play it while you can

These days, it feels like we’re writing a new eulogy for a live-service game every week. It’s an alarming indictment of the video game industry. Games like Highguard are shutting down in record time, before the developers behind them can make tweaks that realize their games’ true potential. And so it pains me to once again gather in this way, this time to pay our respects to a game that will cease to exist come April 9, when its servers shut down. That poor soul is… uh, King of Meat?

Hm, how do I tackle this one gracefully? Writing a send-off to Amazon’s multiplayer dungeon brawler feels a bit like having to write the eulogy for a distant uncle you met once when you were six. Yeah, I played King of Meat the week it launched, but surely there must be someone else who can speak to its legacy, right? Well, not really. Judging by the game’s catastrophic playerbase, it turns out that simply having heard of King of Meat at all kind of makes one a resident authority on it. So off to the pulpit I go.

King of Meat, the debut game from Glowmade, was one of Amazon’s many attempts to land a live-service hit. Launched on October 7, 2025, the co-op game tossed players into a fantasy version of Wipeout, where teams of adventurers traversed through trap-filled dungeons in search of treasure. It had a major focus on user-generated content, as players could create their own obstacle courses and share them online. The creation suite gave players some flexibility to make puzzle-focused dungeons, hack-and-slash arenas, or tricky platforming challenges. Of course, the real goal of the game was to amass cosmetic items and deck your character out.

What else can you say about King of Meat? No, really, what else can you say about it? I know that it’s unusual to take requests from the audience at a funeral, but I’m sweating up here.

I mean, King of Meat was fine. Aggressively fine. The jokes were hacky, the combat was weightless, and the whole thing looked like a Fall Guys knockoff that arrived at the party five years too late. Nothing about it was particularly bad, though. I found some harmless fun in clearing dungeons full of deviously placed spike traps. Hell, I could even argue that it beat the newly released Super Meat Boy 3D at its own game six months ago. So, maybe we can call it ahead of its time? I know, it’s a stretch, but work with me here. We have to respect the dead.

Image: Amazon Games

I suppose I could talk about the game’s potential. That’s an easy go-to when a multiplayer game shuts down. That “potential” was even the focus of my hands-on impressions of the game back in October, where I noted that the concept was a fun-enough foundation to build on, even if the action wasn’t all that exciting. All it needed was the right audience who would fill it with creative dungeons that could keep players entertained. Ah yes, there’s the tragedy of it all! Six months just wasn’t enough time to reach players!

Well, okay, but it kind of was. As much as my instinct is to blame Amazon for failing its duties as a publisher, it put a surprising amount of marketing muscle into King of Meat. It leveraged the power of Twitch on launch day to hype the game up through live streams and ads. It even tapped real-life Jigsaw and child-crypto enthusiast Mr. Beast for help. King of Meat launched with a full-on Mr. Beast collaboration featuring a suite of dungeons made (or signed off on, more likely) by the professional torture artist. I wish I could lie to you and say that King of Meat was a victim of low visibility, but a Mr. Beast video about the game titled “Beat This Game, Win $250,000” currently has 7.7 million views on YouTube. That’s nearly two million more views than President Donald Trump’s most recent State of the Union address via the official White House YouTube channel.

So, that’s where I’m at a loss. Usually a write-up like this, one letting you know that you only have a few days left to play a game before it’s gone, is meant to espouse some wisdom. We give flowers to an underappreciated game, we chastise publishers for failing a great idea, we dissect the brutal nature of the live-service machine — anything to excavate something of value from a body before it is lowered into the ground.

I wish I had a better way of paying respects to King of Meat, but the truth is that it’s not a shutdown deserving of an existential reflection about live service as a whole. It’s still a terrible loss for video game preservation, but the truth of its death is rather mundane: Players just weren’t into it. Could Amazon have helped it find legs by converting it to a free-to-play game rather than a $30 premium one? Maybe. Or maybe not! King of Meat lacked an all-important and impossible-to-quantify “It factor,” and that’s not something you can resolve with a patch.

And so, let this be the wisdom we hold close as we mourn King of Meat this week. Not every lost video game is a martyr that bears the weight of the industry’s sins. Sometimes a game just lacks swag. Amen.