On the 28th of January, Epic Games officially announced that it would be shutting down Paragon for good, with the servers set to go offline in April. As a gesture of good will, Epic Games also announced that it would be refunding anyone who spent money on the game. Usually when a game shuts down, it gets stuck in on a hard drive somewhere and is left to gather dust. However, with Paragon, Epic Games will be doing things differently, giving developers free access to all of the game's assets.
Users of Epic's Unreal Engine will all get free access to Paragon's assets, which are said to be worth around $12 million in total. This includes character models, skins, animations, VFX and dialogue for all 20 hero characters. On top of that, there are 1,500 environment and map files being handed over to the public.
This is just the first drop too, Epic Games will be releasing more Paragon asset packs over the summer. So while the official game will be closing down, it can live on in spirit should developers choose to utilise the assets being released.
All of the assets will be available for free on the Unreal Engine Marketplace. Paragon officially goes offline on the 26th of April.
KitGuru Says: This seems like a great move from Epic. Rather than all that hard work on Paragon going to waste, it will live on and be freely available to developers. This is a move that more developers could learn from in the future.