There are simply too many MMO games on the market and the competition is fierce. Inevitably some of them will fall by the wayside and be trodden into the mud and forgotten but not by their fans or the developers. In this article we take a look at some dead MMO games.
MMO Games Shut Down
Gamers invest a great deal in the MMO game of their choice. They create lives and immerse themselves in these virtual worlds. They spend hours and days and weeks with this other self. They make friends, they fight and they die in these homes away from home. Whatever they put in is rendered irrelevant in the cold hard light of financial day. The majority of big MMO games are about making money. While it may pain the gamers and the developers, if their game doesn’t turn a big enough profit the plug will be pulled. Their beloved virtual world will be flushed away forever. In this article we take a look at when MMO games die.
The Matrix Online - Trouble with Publishers
The most recent big casualty of our capitalist system was the Matrix Online. If ever a universe seemed a natural fit for an MMO game it had to be the Matrix. It featured people jacking into a virtual world and running amok trying to defeat the system. It provided an obvious appeal for fans of the films and gamers seeking an alternative to fantasy or spaceships. The developers took a different approach but even before release in 2005 the game seemed to be in trouble. Ubisoft shirked their agreement to co-publish, the last two films didn’t do as well as expected at the box office and the MMO game sector was becoming more overcrowded than ever.
Warner Bros. and Sega ended up publishing and after a couple of months Sony Online Entertainment took the operating rights from developer Monolith. The game was set in the virtual Mega City where most of the film is set. Players were divided into Coder, Hacker and Operative classes and there were various opposed factions. The story from the films was continued in the game and unfolded via new missions and chapters. The game was slow to build an audience. It had a strong focus on combat but visually speaking it was far from the prettiest MMO game on the block. It also lacked variety with repetitive missions and it had more than its fair share of bugs.
The Matrix Offline - Story Issues, Less Subscribers Than Expected
There were some good things about the game too. It drew on an interesting universe and developed real stories within that world which you could take part in. The combat was fun and the character development choice was relatively open. As the game progressed and the world of the Matrix changed the story development actually became a hindrance to new players because they didn’t understand what was going on. The remaining characters from the films were all ditched quite quickly. Sony also inevitably tried to make their own mark on the game when they took over and not all of the changes were well thought out, to put it nicely.
The Matrix Online struggled to reach 50,000 subscribers and it failed to draw in the huge fanbase of the films. The shut down of the game was announced on the 1st of June and the servers were turned off forever on the 31st July 2009.