Single Player Tarkov Is Shutting Down After a Trademark Notice From Battlestate Games
Battlestate Games sent Single Player Tarkov's team a trademark notice, and shutting down instead of just renaming is the part nobody involved has actually explained.
Battlestate Games sent Single Player Tarkov's team a trademark violation notice. The notice itself, reviewed by Insider Gaming, demanded an end to all Tarkov branding and a change to the project's domain name. SPT lead Refringe says the notice was sent to them personally. The team posted to its Discord on August 1, confirming that development as currently structured is finished, with the site, patch hosting, and domain set to go dark by August 12, though the source code will stay available for a future team to build from.
The Timeline Got Messy Fast
Before the team was ready to make a formal announcement, internal communications reportedly leaked, and people started building their own narrative around them. Two staff members, DrakiaXYZ and RaiRaiTheRaichu, then moved to separate two claims that easily blur together: the leak forced an early announcement and shaped how the project's assets get handed off, but the trademark notice, not the leak, is what actually ends development.
The Question That Doesn't Get Answered
No cease-and-desist lawsuit exists, just a notice, and that notice's own demand was narrower than the shutdown that followed it: branding and a domain change, not an end to development. Most of the pushback lands on exactly that gap, why stripping the Tarkov name from the project and continuing under it wasn't enough. The team's public answer addresses a different question, why the project can't simply be handed to someone else, citing the risk of passing over passwords, DMs, and emails to people they don't fully trust.
A Decision That Was Already Made
RaiRaiTheRaichu says version 4.1 "has always been the intended last version," which sits awkwardly next to a shutdown framed as forced and premature. That lines up with something else: most of the live game's post-1.0 content had already been backported into SPT, except for quests, story missions, Terminal, and Icebreaker, meaning SPT's pace against the live game had been slipping before any of this started.
The Part BSG Doesn't Have to Worry About
Single Player Tarkov only runs for people who already own a legitimate copy of Escape from Tarkov. The mod requires the purchase before it does anything. Whatever a trademark notice is meant to protect, it isn't lost sales, since nobody's running SPT without having already paid Battlestate first.
Where It Stands
Refringe says the plan was always for another team to eventually pick up the project. The GitHub organization will be archived and renamed to strip Tarkov references rather than deleted, and Refringe has packaged the repositories, including their history, to share with people willing to carry it forward. Battlestate hasn't said anything publicly about why now, or what it actually wants changed beyond the branding.
