General Discussion

I think unlike other games ,mmorpg are a commitment and also unlike other games when support ends you can still play them ,with mmorpg this is not the case.

I recall i played TA a long time after the company that made it went under and did not support it.I played it until i upgraded to windows xp and could not anymore because xp did not support it.

With auto assault,AC2 and other shutdown mmorpg it was not the case.It shutdown and thats that.Some might have commited years of $$$ and time and lost it without much of a compensation if any at all.

Maybe they should at least release the coding to community and let them run free servers even if they are crappy,unreliable and slow but at least they work and people can continue playing.

They should, but they won't.

There was a big push from Earth & Beyond players to buy the rights to the game from EA when it shut down... I think they had secured something like $15,000 for the cause, but EA wouldn't sell. There were thousands of players who wanted to continue to play, myself among them.

I'm no marketing specialist, but my guess is that dead games stay dead because people playing free games are less likely to have a subscription to an active game.

Originally posted by VideoJockey

There was a big push from Earth & Beyond players to buy the rights to the game from EA when it shut down... I think they had secured something like $15,000 for the cause, but EA wouldn't sell. There were thousands of players who wanted to continue to play, myself among them.

I'm no marketing specialist, but my guess is that dead games stay dead because people playing free games are less likely to have a subscription to an active game.

TBH this is one thing i think SoE did right.They made an all access fee and this helps keep games that would otherwise be closed like matrix online alive.

Considering NCsoft has many mmorpg such as lineage 1 & 2 ,CoH etc they could have kept AA alive with an all access package.

Same goes for turbine who has 3 other living mmorpg with AC2 and ofc EA has DAoC ,sims online and UO which they could have bundled E&B with

I know of one game that has survived this way, redmoon online now labeled redmoon online classic. 

A game that I would have liked to have went this way wasnt even around long enough to have gotten a foot hold in the gaming comunity because it was shut down 8 hours after it went into beta called Dream, pretty much the greatest game that never was.

If I recall correctly, there was this 1 particularly forward attempt by the group VCA (Virtual Citizenship Association) to buy out Ryzom at late 2006 when its IP owner were on the brink of bankruptcy. Needless to say, it wasn't successful and another company (obviously more organized and with much much ample resources) had beaten them to the finish line. But the point is, VCA's objectives had made considerable public impact and had contributed to raise the awareness that failed or stunted MMOs can (or should) in fact be open for interested parties in public for continuity. Of course realistically, the lines aren't as clear as how we all would prefer it to be as outlined by Raph Koster in a not so old blog post of his.

Personally some of his viewpoints were a bit crude as in some were as redundant as all are already the norm in the mainstream business (where he touched on RMT and grey shards' concerns) for years before VCA's attempts till now.

Wasnt there a group that took a microsoft spaceflight sim game and saved it?

Who cares?

New games coming up every month/year

I think such a thing would go a long way at boosting consumer confidence in the genre as a whole.  One of the reasons I was skeptical at this genre for awhile is the question of "how many months will I have before the service closes down and my software becomes useless?"

Part of the reason I think Blizzard did so well is because they've maintained Battle.net for so long, that people know that WoW wouldn't fold if they didn't pull their quota for a quarter.

So if I don't support a game, I might get to play it for free?