On March 28th, Naughty Dog revealed its plan to retire the free-to-play mobile spinoff Uncharted: Fortune Hunter. Naughty Dog announced its decision to shut the game down over Twitter. As of 3:00 PM EST, players can no longer download Uncharted: Fortune Hunter from Google Play or the iOS App Store, and the developer removed the game’s pages from both platforms. The company’s also disabled the in-game store. Existing players can still play Uncharted: Fortune Hunter if they already have it installed on their devices but will not be able to reinstall it later.
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Judging by the Twitter responses, most Uncharted fans will not be mourning Fortune Hunter’s shutdown, as its lack of popularity is a far cry from the rest of the games in the popular third-person action-adventure franchise. In fact, many people on Twitter had never even heard of the game before Naughty Dog announced its retirement. For anyone who’s wondering, Uncharted: Fortune Hunter is a free-to-play puzzle platformer developed by PlayStation Mobile with assistance from Naughty Dog and published by Sony Computer entertainment. It had players lead Uncharted protagonist Nathan Drake through over 200 levels and puzzles. Players move from tile to tile to avoid traps and recover a treasure from each level. Sony released Uncharted: Fortune Hunter in 2016, and its last update was in June of last year.
One of the most significant features of Uncharted: Fortune Hunter is that it lets players unlock exclusive cosmetic items in Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End’s multiplayer mode. These are the Casual Drake Outfit, Newsboy Hat, France Sully Outfit, Dark Knotted Wood Weapon Skin, Copper Weapon Skin, and Top Hat, all of which players unlocked by completing various challenges or reaching progression milestones. Thus, Fortune Hunter’s shutdown may leave all six items permanently unavailable. However, it’s unclear if Naughty Dog intends to make those items unlockable through some other means.
Unfortunately for the legacy of Uncharted: Fortune Hunter, the game seems destined to fade from memory. As stated above, many Uncharted fans seem to have either forgotten it existed or never heard about it, to begin with. Most of the shutdown announcement’s Twitter replies were more interested in whether Naughty Dog will release either Uncharted 5 or The Last of Us: Factions, the highly anticipated multiplayer spinoff for The Last of Us Part 2. Hopefully, those games are more successful than Uncharted’s ill-fated mobile spinoff.
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