America’s Army–The Government’s Video Game Used To Recruit–Is Shutting Down

The offi­cial video game of the US Army, par­tial­ly used in the recruit­ing efforts, is draw­ing to end. Amer­i­ca’s Army: Prov­ing Grounds will shut down on May 5th, after eight long years of sup­port, as announced on the game’s forums.

With­in this announce­ment, the Army said the free-to-play game was the first large-scale use of video game tech­nol­o­gy for recruit­ment and com­mu­ni­ca­tion when it launched. The fran­chise has three main titles, and man­aged to reach 20 mil­lion play­ers. Prov­ing Grounds, the lat­est ver­sion, was released back in 2013.

Accord­ing to the post, the game has now “ful­filled its mis­sion” and is shut­ting down. Mov­ing ahead, the Army said it will be shift­ing its focus on “oth­er new and inno­v­a­tive” ways to com­mu­ni­cate and recruit would-be soldiers.

“None of this would have been pos­si­ble with­out our play­ers, so thank you for your ded­i­ca­tion and con­tin­ued sup­port through­out these years,” the Army said. “We look for­ward to what the future could hold for AA, and encour­age you to stay tuned for future announce­ments on the series.”

Amer­i­ca’s Army is avail­able on PS4 and PC through Steam, but not Xbox. On May 5th, offi­cial servers will shut down, end­ing all online ser­vices. The game will be removed from PSN on that day, with online play and play­er stats also being unavail­able; offline fea­tures will still be sup­port­ed. On Steam, offi­cial servers are clos­ing, but any­one who owns a pri­vate serv­er or the Mis­sion Edi­tor can keep play­ing past the end-date. Offline fea­tures for the Steam ver­sion will also be supported.

Addi­tion­al­ly, the Amer­i­ca’s Army web­site is also shut­ting down, so play­ers won’t be able to log in, check stats, or access any oth­er content.