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.
