Demise
By March 16, 1997, people could only play within their local area code. On April 30, 1997, the entire network was removed.
XBAND had announced in their previous monthly newsletter that they were shutting down, with the newsletter writers citing the service's lack of popularity as the cause. During XBAND's existence, only a handful of advertisements were ever made, and only one game, Weaponlord, had the XBAND logo on its box. XBAND stated in their newsletter that players were their best form of advertising, and offered the "XBAND 6 pack", where members could order six modems at a discounted rate and receive a month of free gaming in exchange for siging up a certain number of people to the service.
Heavy contributors to XBAND's demise were the lack of support from game developers and limited internal resources. With the exception of Weaponlord, Catapult had to individually reverse engineer each game's code, then develop a hack to intercept two-player activity so the game could be shared over a high-latency (slow response time), 2400-baud modem connection.
Catapult's second generation attempts were blocked by the hardware manufacturers. The XBAND was tested in Japan (using a 14,400 baud modem) for a short time for the Sega Saturn, but met competition from Sega's own Sega NetLink service, which also used XBAND technology. An expansion into the PC market didn't pan out either, as developers frequently opted to include their own network linking rather than deal with Catapult's subscription-based service.
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