4Stack #16 — answers & breakdown

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

Live-service games by genre, with a purple group defined by what happened to them rather than what they are.

The sixteen cards in this puzzle were: World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, RuneScape, Guild Wars 2, Destiny 2, Warframe, The Division, Escape from Tarkov, Valheim, Rust, Subnautica, The Forest, Concord, Babylon's Fall, The Culling, LawBreakers.

The four stacks

MMORPGs

World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, RuneScape, Guild Wars 2

The subscription-era survivors, all still running years after launch.

Looter & extraction shooters

Destiny 2, Warframe, The Division, Escape from Tarkov

Loot-driven shooters. Escape from Tarkov is the extraction outlier, where the loot only counts if you get out alive.

Survival crafting

Valheim, Rust, Subnautica, The Forest

Survival crafting. Subnautica is the gentlest of them and the only one with no other players to worry about.

Shut down after flopping

Concord, Babylon's Fall, The Culling, LawBreakers

Games that shut down after failing commercially. Concord is the extreme case — Sony took it offline roughly two weeks after launch in 2024 and refunded buyers.

Want to try it yourself? Play puzzle #16 — archive plays don't affect your streak. Or jump into today's puzzle.