efforts to secure that for Fortnite Battle Royale. On May 21, 2019, while still in early access, Dauntless was released for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, as well as transitioned Windows players to the Epic Games Store. Prior to release, Phoenix Labs only had anticipated having cross-platform play between Windows and Xbox One users, as they were still in discussions with Sony on PlayStation 4 cross-platform support, but by May 21, they had secured the approval from Sony. As such, Dauntless is the first game to ship at launch with cross-play between these three major platforms. Within days of launch, the 3-million player base doubled to 6 million, putting initial stress on the game's servers during this period while Phoenix worked to expand server capacity. The game officially left early access on September 26, 2019 with its 1.0 launch and first major expansion "Aether Unbound", with a total of 15 million players at that point. The Switch version was released on December 10, 2019, and versions for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S launched on December 2, 2021. These versions support cross-platform play and progression with Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One versions. Phoenix Labs acquired Bot School Inc. in August 2019 to help with Dauntless support and cross-play features. Phoenix Labs were acquired themselves by Garena in January 2020. The acquirement did not affect normal operation of Phoenix Labs or Dauntless, and served to bolster Garena's international presence. For Phoenix, the acquisition potentially allowed them to develop towards mobile game space. Reception Dauntless received tentatively positive reviews at the time of release. Game Informer thought that the core monster hunting gameplay was focused and fun, but warned that advanced players would run out of new content fairly quickly. GameSpot was less enthusiastic, praising the weapon variety and monster design, but criticizing the bugs in the early version of the game and the setting, story, and characters being unfulfilling and not fleshed out. References External links 2019 video games Cooperative video games Fantasy video games Free-to-play video games Multiplayer and single-player video games Nintendo Switch games PlayStation 4 games Windows games Xbox One games Unreal Engine games Action role-playing video games Indie video games Video games developed in Canada Video games with cross-platform play