Former RLCS World Champion Vatira declares Rocket League is dead

Jack Stewart, Senior Editor

Last Updated: 19/11/2025

Karmine Corp Rocket League pro Axel ‘Vatira’ Touret has blasted Epic Games and Psyonix, saying the game is dying.

Vatira is one of Rocket League’s most accomplished esports pros. Earlier this year, he and KCorp triumphed at the Esports World Cup.

Vatira is also the youngest player to win an RLCS LAN in the open era and is a former World Champion after winning RLCS in 2023.

However, the Frenchman is furious with the current state of the game and has taken to social media to express his frustrations.

Other than announcing that “Rocket League is dead,” Vatira went on a tirade complaining that DDoS issues in the game haven’t been addressed:

“DDOS and BOTS are EVERYWHERE. This game is unplayable and now in RLCS some players have tools to win and take cash prizes from legit players.

“WHERE ARE WE GOING…”

Hackers have taken over ranked in Rocket League, with the ability to DDoS opponents and ruin their connections to cheatingly win.

A denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is “a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network.”

Back in July, English pro Jack ‘ApparentlyJack’ Benton publicly demanded that Rocket League’s DDOS issues be fixed, but nothing has happened.

In fact, these issues have persisted in the online game for well over a year now, and it is actively driving players and content creators away.

However, the game still has a healthy playerbase and is far from ‘dying’ despite what players claim.

This week, the game has been sporting peaks of a little under 500,000 concurrent players and around 160,000 ranked players.

What does the future hold for Rocket League?

While the game is maintaining a healthy playerbase, the future of Rocket League is still in doubt.

Rocket League has been out for over 10 years now and rumours have long been circulating about what Epic Games has planned.

One of those longstanding rumours is that Rocket League will move into the Fortnite portal.

This would potentially means players would have to download Fortnite and go through its menus in order to launch Rocket League.

It does seem apparent that after 10 years, Rocket League needs an update or a second version released.

Players have been begging for the game’s engine to be updated to Unreal Engine 5.

Even back in 2021, a job advertisement at Psyonix mentioned that there were plans to upgrade Rocket League to UE5.

Yet it still hasn’t happened.

Fans were gutted that there was no Unreal Engine 5 announcement for Rocket League at the 2025 RLCS World Championships.

The playerbase are still waiting for a big update to ‘save’ the game.

Jack Stewart, Senior Editor

In my seven years of esports writing, I've introduced esports coverage to newspapers, interviewed some of the biggest names in the industry, and driven viewers mad with the puns in my YouTube scripts. I'm most proud of the latter.

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