At one point, all game development studios wanted to have the same set of productions at their house – a MOBA, a brawler, and a card game. This worked out better for some, and worse for others.
Breaking up one production into several games in different genres is a very good idea, as evidenced by League of Legends and Riot Games. Some have gone in the same direction, and CDPR just happened to have a very easy task here.
After all, Gwent has always been an important part of The Witcher. All they had to do was take out the mechanics and make it into a separate title. This one, unfortunately, was not very popular, resulting in the official termination of support.
Gwent will stop getting updates
This is not an announcement of the end of the game, but Gwent will no longer receive any updates from 2024. CDPR is dropping support, and while this doesn’t mean closing the servers, the game will now really be limited to connoisseurs alone.
In theory, there are still events and sizable updates planned for 2023, but the number of people interested in this will be relatively small. It seems that the greatest interest came when the launch of the game was announced and now that the production is going away in a sense.
As for the number of players, it looks like this on Steam:
Peaks are decreasing month by month, although they remain at a similar level. CDPR must have seen a downward trend and hence the decision. It’s a bit of a shame that the game didn’t achieve success, but the card game market in general is very thankless. There are simply other, more interesting games on the market and not even in this genre.