f13.net

To follow on from the thread looking at which MMOGs will hold player attention in December 2007 and December 2008, I'd like to throw out the reverse of that: which MMOGs will be gone / cancelled / no longer supported by paid devs by December 2007 and December 2008? Feel free to consider MMOGs that have already launched and are in slow decay as well as those yet to launch but won't stand a chance.

December 2007
Auto Assault
Matrix Online

December 2008
SWG

Not bad :)
Problem being there are not enough candidates. I would go with the oldies, like Asheron's Call, or EverQuest (maybe in late 2008), but after all, I don't think that'll happen and we won't see any perceivable (as in: I don't care if Ballerium, or Risk Your Life Online die..) MMO death. Maybe just those already comatose, like Ryzom and Shadowbane.
And in all honesty, I guess your nominations will all survive in a way or another.. especially being SOE and NC: "Passes" will probably prevent death, zombiefying them all and creating the firsts undead MMOs (rotting flesh included).

EDIT: bah.. it's 4am here..

December 2007

Auto Assault


December 2008

SWG
Matrix Online
UO?
FFXI
AC
AO
Ragnarok Online

To be perfectly honest with you, I don't see the old Sony MMOs dying the way that Turbine's AC2 did - they needed to cannibalize AC2 in order to be able to save that cash for throwing money at DDO and LotRO.

Sony MMOs will slowly be consolidated to one server, and then put on that one pass you get that comes with the tank game and the top down 'Subspace, but you're a guy' shooter.

They will stop receiving updates, yeah, but they'll just keep going forever. And someone, somewhere will play it. Those will keep running until the nuclear apocalypse.

That, and you realize that for a lot of these older games, the longer time goes on, the less bandwidth and attention it takes to keep them running, and the less staff you need to run them. If anything, server virtualization will keep them going forever.

As far as the MMOs currently running, I don't see any of them being shut down. Cut down dramatically, yes, but not shut down entirely.

MMOGs with a reasonably sized core subscriber base never die, they just eventually stop producing updates.

I can only see games going the way of Earth and Beyond when the company is taking desperate measures to cut down the cost of overhead.  Westwood was one of those companies.  NCSoft and SOE likely will never be.

So, does that mean in a few years, I can go back and try EQ from the beginning again?

If they hold another one of those events where they open a server without expansions and unlock additional ones as players take down the biggest epic mob available at the time, sure.

A better question is, why would you want to play EQ from the beginning after you've played the few clones that successfully improved upon it?

Oh, just because.... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masochism)

By December 2008, I'd give DAOC an outside chance of being history, if only because it is now owned by EA.  I agree that Sony would keep a game like that on life support eternally on the Station Pass, but EA has a long and distinguished history of MMO cancellations.  DAOC is limping along with a declining subscriber base, has to be substantially less than 100k now, and Warhammer promises to poach many of EA-Mythic's own customers.

Alternate scenario -- EA does an about-face and creates a Madden Pass for all of its online games...  DAOC lives forever, along with UO, offering a one-stop shop for MMO fans who refuse to upgrade their gaming rigs.

Oh, my bet in this tontine - and you'll kick yourselves for not picking this particular low-hanging fruit - is Dark and Light.  I'd add Ryzom but I don't suppose it really counts as being alive.

Ah, that's right!
But HaemishM is right: some random idiots will buy and sell it a couple of time before pulling the plug for good. So I predict it will somehow drag on to 2009.

'07
Sims Online
Auto Assault

'08
Roma Victor
Matrix Online

Sims Online is still alive? Holy shit.


Also, Dark and Light. lol


Also, add in Shadowbane for 2008. Hopefully L2 as well.

That was my reaction.  I am strangely tempted to check and see if they have a free demo or something.  I never tried it, and I think that I probably should, if I am to be able to laugh properly when it dies.

L2 is still limping along.  Hell, the original Lineage is still chugging along.  I doubt we will see L2's demise anytime soon.

Sims Online?  Wow, I thought it had a stillbirth.  I remember all the speculations about MILLIONS of sims addicts making the transition.

Since I feel the need to defend L2, as the only person on this site who submitted themselves (checkin' out Ironwood's link to help remember the good times) to that game for a long period of time. L2's subscription numbers are up in the US/EU territories, far surpassing what they were at release. Normally, I would dismiss this as farmers running 30 or 40+ botted accounts by one person, but in all honesty they've been kicking the botters asses for the past couple months. Massive bans, raid farmers are gone (those were huge farmer guilds to do raid bosses), and the american/european botters have been getting banned very regularly. And I'd say that their new user campaign from when the last chronicle came out, when they spammed MMORPG.com with interviews and ads and shit, was pretty successful.

So, L2 sure isn't limping over here. It's numbers are down in Korea, but it's still the second biggest "hardcore" mmo over there, right behind L1. They'll be making money for the next 10 years, and then some.

I actually enjoyed my time with L2 last year.  My issue was I had no one to play with!  If I had a guild or a couple people to chat with while I was there I would sign back on in a heartbeat.  I really enjoyed playing as a dwarf; I may renew my sub just for the hell of it this week or next.

Undead is still dead :-)

As of the last edition of the BruceChart (usual disclaimers apply) FFXI was hanging on to half a million subscribers.  That isn't terribly shabby.  Granted it can fall far in two years, but predicting it's demise by 12/08 seems unduly pessimistic.

I really want to see FFXI die.

Also, unduly pessimistic? Welcome to F13.  :evil:

December 2007:

Auto Assualt
Dark and Light
Ryzom

These all seem like safe bets

December 2008:

UO, and it'll only hold on this long because of stubborness. It should have died years ago.
SWG if the station pass doesn't keep it on life support indefinitely.

They added academies in C5, which is basically like an extra branch for top level guilds. They only allow players level 1-40 to join an academy, and you're not flagged for any of the guild wars or anything that the main guild is involved in, so you won't be getting ganked much more than usual.

On the plus side it gives you a place to talk to people, and a potential guild to move up to when you hit level 40. You also get academy gear, like special cheaper than normal armor with fairly lame set bonuses, but it looks cool. Then the guild you join gets reputation points (used by the clan for upgrades like clan-wide passive buffs) when you do your dreaded level 40 class change quest, so it's good for them too. Really, it's a cool system, you should check it out.

Edit: But I'm going to have to strongly recommend against being a dwarf. I've only known 1 or 2 who made it high enough level to subclass without being botted for a substantial period of time. With the new newbie helping shit, you should consider re-rolling. They made regeneration of HP/MP much faster for levels 1-40 to decrease downtime, and theres all kinds of stuff to make the gameplay a ton faster through those levels. I haven't played since those updates though, so I don't know if they've made it so fast that level 41 hits you like a ton of bricks or not.

Vanguard.

Nah: it'll take them half that time to turn it into an FPS, for one thing.

MMOG's never die.  They will always reside in my heart.

I'll die at 45 though.  From all the crap in my heart.

You could have done that last July, on one of the two new Progression servers they launched.  400+ in the Commonlands, and the griffin slaughtering unchecked because nobody was high enough level to kill it.  Those servers are currently on the POP/GoD expansions, with the expectation that the OoW expansion will be unlocked Feb-Mar. EQ is currently in beta on their 13th expansion, with the high end raid content from the last expansion having been first beaten a bit before Christmas.  I'm guessing that July of 2008 they might release another Progression server, once the current servers get up to the current release of the day.  That will probably be your next chance to hear people complain that EQ nowadays sucks because corpse runs are too easy, and you can go places without having to run for hours.

SWG. I think the Station Pass has room for only one high-budget leech at a time, and it's new name is Vanguard. OTOH, I gather the SWG team is pretty bare now. If they can consolidate servers, they'll live. If not, goodbye and thank God.

That's what I meant by Access earlier... Station Pass.  I keep calling it Access.  Boo me.

I really wonder exactly how many crappy, nearly dead MMOGs SOE can keep putting on the Station Pass. It's nice to get a package all-in-one, but there has to be some value in there really...

Does SOE still run that PS2 version of EQ that I was pretty sure killed MMOGs for consoles up until all these new guys announced they were going to do it anyway~

EverQuest Online Adventures? Died about a year ago.

Ach schade...

I beta'd that :(

So did I, while my husband laughed at me. 

AC2 didn't die because it was a shit game with no subscribers. Well OK, it did die because of that, but the trigger was Turbine moving from microsoft to their own billing. In the migration they lost all the accounts of people who continued to subscribe without playing because they never bothered to cancel and it was only $13/month, or they logged on once per major patch just to check it out, and so on. Apparently there is a HUGE number of suckers who will pay a monthly fee without playing.

But the key here is that AC2 was a failure commercially and critically and they STILL managed to hang on with that initial spike of subscribers and diehard players. Given that, of the big names, I'm betting only auto assault will die in 2007/2008. Only auto assault was such a total failure that it has no chance to grow. The matrix online, the sims online, those games will survive forever. UO will probably outlive us all. And drek like dark and light was always third tier, so who cares.

What? EQOA never killed MMOGs on consoles. It was just another shitty game. FFXI, Phantasty Star - they are still alive and kicking. And will be for a while to come.

I don't know if its going to be 07 or 08, but my bet is on AC1 to die within two years. That place is a ghost town.

I'd say that Ryzom will probably croak too. I think that Matrix and SWG have a chance at being gone within two years as well. I never thought someone could screw up Star Wars Online, but it seems that SOE can only do well with game's called Everquest.

MMORPG's are hard as hell to kil. Companies just kill the CS resources and run them on the cheap.  Horizons is still alive and  Jumpate still chugs on with 20 to 30 people logging in every night.

Perhaps the right way to phrase the topic was "which game will have less than 1,000 people playing?"

Sniff, true.  I said a couple of years ago to a friend that I'd pay $200 for a single player AC1.    Back in July 06 in a fit of boredom and ease of online purchase, download and account creation, I bought it and started over.   I rolled a 10-sided dice to pick my server, and lucked out with Verdantine - the emptiest of the empty AC1 servers.

And I am so happy playing it!   It what I always wanted: single player AC1.    I've *NEVER* in 5 months of playing ran across another player in a dungeon, and only once or twice in the wild.  There is an occasional one in the major towns, and there is a buff-bot in Holtburg so there are people there most times.

That was actually my 4th AC1 restart from scratch.  I always feel I've left parts undone is what draws me back, unlike DAOC, WoW, etc where I felt totally finished with when I quit.

I just hope they never merge servers, allow server transfers, or allow free subs,   I'd quit if Verdantine got heavily populated (I'd also drop dead in shock).