Friday, November 21, 2008

And the next MMO is.....

Tabula Rasa...

Haha..

Thanks to this little doozy

So, on Dec. 10th, I will register my key from my .96 cent box, and enjoy my 30 days...which will turn into 60 days instead. What a hoot.

Nice.

Of course I better verify I can do that, or suffer the Hellgate fate, where anyone that bought a box after the announcement of death could not sign up for online access.

2 Months...about as much as I can stay in an MMO nowadays anyways.
Perfect amount of time.

Goodbye TR. And with that, the death of another Sci-Fi MMO.

Elves and Dwarves FTW!!!

6 comments:

Gamer Hudson said...

Ouch harsh! I guess not much harsher than me refusing to heal Night Elves, but hey we all have an evil side.

Saw this coming. I have a knack to bail on MMO's that don't seem to be doing too well. Which one is next?

Tesh said...

When will the industry realize that a saturated market isn't the right place to attempt to bank on a subscription model?

If they have designed their business plan and server costs such that subscription is the only way to be profitable, it's their own fault that the game crashed. People will always come to play good games, but not to be extorted by them.

If they would open the servers to free players indefinitely, I'd play the game, and I know others would too. The Guild Wars model works, beancounters!

Elementalistly said...

What is funny is TR has Guild Wars server modeling in place. Seperate servers all accesible by one teleporter...like the town hubs in GW.

They could have offered also an SOE all in one deal.
Nope, instead lets take the loss I guess..

Maybe it was a big tax write off.

knightblaster said...

NC has a history of cutting and running. They did the same with Auto Assault. And in this economic environment, it isn't terribly surprising that they canned TR, really, although it's never a great thing for the industry to see another MMO offlined.

I do think that a non-subscriber model seems poised to do well in these economic times. Perhaps GW2. Who knows?

In terms of who is next ... a lot of speculation about AoC being next on the chopping block, but given how long Funcom has supported AO, that doesn't seem likely to me ... possible, but not likely.

Anonymous said...

TR does not have the Guild Wars model. They just have separate game world instancesthat anyone can log on to, but the characters are not shared between them.

Teleporters are just between instances within one game world, not between the game world instances.

As long as a game makes more money than it costs to operate I do not think they will close it, be it NCSoft or Funcom. Tabula Rasa did not make enough money for that, but they were not that much below the limit NCSoft had set early this year.

Elementalistly said...

@Brendan
a lot of speculation about AoC being next on the chopping block

This I think is actually far from one that will fail just yet...

Several reasons.

They have a stable player base now. Not big, but definitely larger than TR or even EQ2 based on chartings and sales.

The server merge along with the instanced technology equals lower cost to run the servers.

Forward looking engine, and slightly differing mechanics leaves room for AoC to grow, and as long as they take an aggressive stance once the game is fixed up to bring back players...this helps.

Opening in Russia and Korea. Note, Russia only has WoW as it's competition. This could be VERY interesting to watch as there outlook on the MMO may be totally different than ours, and it would be cool to see who would garner more scrips (do you think Russia has heard of Blizzard or Conan more,,,)

So, I would not write off AoC no matter how much some people want to. Their new content actually has increased the play times on Xfire, which is hard to do nowadays.

Wonder who could be next?