Harmonix’s music mashup maker Fuser is being delisted from sale

There are so many games released each year that I sometimes only notice a couple of years after the fact. Unfortunately that’s sometimes long enough for a game to be U.Nreleased again. So it is with Fuser, Harmonix’s 2020 music game in which players create new works by mashing up other people’s songs. It’s being delisted from sale later this month and its “live services” are being switched off.

“We want to thank you for mixing with us. On December 19, we will be disabling FUSER’s live services and all sales of the game, as well as its DLC,” reads the statement on the Fuser site. “Players who already own FUSER will still be able to play the Campaign and Quick Play with any DLC they have already acquired.

“Thank you again for your support and for all the amazing mixes over the years.”

“Live services” is somewhat vague, but Fuser includes both online PvP and co-op modes which seem likely to be for the chop. The announcement offers no reason for the closure, but presumably it has to do with expiring licenses for the many songs contained within Fuser.

Fuser gives you access to a library of music split into ‘stems’, which are the layered tracks which together make up a song. You can then overlay stems from one song with stems from another in order to please a virtual crowd and score points. Colm (RPS in peace) had a lot of fun with it around release, advocating for blending the vocals from Ace Of Base’s 1993 hit The Sign go with the music from DMX’s X Gon’ Give It To Ya.

Perhaps significantly in retrospect, Colm was writing about it as one of “the best games you missed” in 2020. Still, even if the player numbers were low, I imagine it doesn’t feel great to have enjoyed Fuser, maybe dropped a bunch of money on DLC, and soon no longer be able to play it with friends. (Perhaps also significantly, Fuser was published by NCSoft but developers Harmonix were acquired by Epic last year.)

If you want to grab the base game before it disappears from sale, it’ll cost you £17.39 on Steam.