Playdom only recently acquired the publishing rights to The Chronicles of the Spellborn from Acclaim. Earlier this week, a server outage caused many to wonder if the game had been shut down for good. Games.com has received confirmation from a Playdom rep that, while Monday's issue was unrelated, The Chronicles of the Spellborn will indeed be shut down for good at the end of August.

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Today was a bleak day in the MMO world with Earth Eternal, Three Kingdoms and The Chronicles of the Spellborn all closing down. What are your thoughts?

I think the maturization of the F2P market will create competition and we'll see more and more of these deaths due to the payment plan being far less reliable and potentially a source of disconfort.

It's a high-risk business running a F2P and competition will lead to deaths like in any such business.

Odd, why buy it only to shut it down?  Unless they tend to do some work on it and re-release it with some sort of payment model attached to it.

Originally posted by Kyleran

Odd, why buy it only to shut it down?  Unless they tend to do some work on it and re-release it with some sort of payment model attached to it.

 

acclaim paid them to buy it, so wouldnt be closed down in their name :P

I say with all honesty, this is a good day. None of those games had a playerbase and there just taking up bandwith. Hopefully the publishers can view what worked and what did not and come back with a more polished and successful entity. Until then, I ask why are more games hanging around with dismal player bases and stale content?

Sad to see this. TCoS was a solid game with refreshing and fun combat. It is a shame that poor publishing choices doomed this game before it had a chance. But we all know the whatever WoW-clone comes out next will be sure to find a top-notch publisher.

Originally posted by AlienShirt

Sad to see this. TCoS was a solid game with refreshing and fun combat. It is a shame that poor publishing choices doomed this game before it had a chance. But we all know the whatever WoW-clone comes out next will be sure to find a top-notch publisher.

I hear ya.  Look at my account name, this game was gonna be huge for me.  Unfortunately, even though the game was fun and unique it had no playerbase, and an mmo without players makes for a really poor single player game - no matter how good it is.  Like you said, publishing doomed this title, which is a real shame because it could have been something great.  Oh well, there goes another one I guess.

Originally posted by AlienShirt

Sad to see this. TCoS was a solid game with refreshing and fun combat. It is a shame that poor publishing choices doomed this game before it had a chance. But we all know the whatever WoW-clone comes out next will be sure to find a top-notch publisher.

 

I agree, and lets hope some other developers decide to utilize the combat system as I thought it was great.

Originally posted by AlienShirt

Sad to see this. TCoS was a solid game with refreshing and fun combat. It is a shame that poor publishing choices doomed this game before it had a chance. But we all know the whatever WoW-clone comes out next will be sure to find a top-notch publisher.

 TSOC was a really fun game, different and unique. I loved my fat toon. Most other games just let you pick some lovebaby of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dolf Lundgren (hey I wouldn't complain if they took Vinnie Jones as example) or some smooth shaven in baby-oil rubbed Orlando Bloom. The game really deserved a better ending!

 Oh so apparently this rumor was true, seen a post by someone yesterday about it with some vague article attached, and it made me wonder.

 What a shame, I tried to play this sometime last month since it looked very different, but was having connecting to server issues, guess i'll never get that chance now though.

I dont think its a bad day.

TCoS was a niche game and could never been have more than a niche game, a few nice ideas arent enough and the management did the best to make it a dead born so it never had a chance to get its niche.

The other two get never on my radar.

For the employees that have mabye spend their soul and heart on their product it is a hard experience as its hard to accept the success is never depending only on skill but also as much or even more on oportunity.

With the hundreds of mmos out and the very long development cycle of a mmo there is only a very slim chance to time it right to catch the few oportunitys that may happen - in reality its impossible for any underfunded developer.

I was already in the most early beta phases, and really I am not surprised at all. Spellborn never really got out of beta, and even back then I always felt the game was clumsy to play and way too odd in many ways. I suppose many ppl didn't even hear of Spellborn.

It's always a pity when creative visions die, but then even a great vision needs a solid gameplay. And Spellborn just didn't have that.

Unique combat

Great artwork style

Not strictly gear based

Unique classes

Nobody to play with....

Game needs to be polished and then re-released!

TCOS 4life!

Oh sad to hear about this. The game had an unique atmosphere and great combatsystem. But I guess it was one of those failed launched MMO's that was doomed to die like this (dividing Europe lol). Just too bad for the players who are currently enjoying it.

One of the atmospheric games I ever played.... I don't think they take such a revolutionary try again very soon. The game hadn't a big player-base but a lot of reliable players... I was one of these :'(

A rough diamond .... unfortunatly it never got cut and polished to sparkle as it should.

The MMO model has to change. I don't mean pay-to-play or free-to-play, but rather the production cycle. There is so much startup capital required for these games, and development time is so long, it's no wonder there is a failure epidemic.

I followed Spellborne for quite a while, and a bunch of talented developers bankrupted themselves making this game.  Many of us reading this site, are in software development. This isn't right. There hasn't been a real superstar MMO hit since World of Warcraft in 2004. Think about how many console hits there have been in that time.  The original God of War for example came out for PS2 in 2005!

Small fortunes are being spent, trying to catch World of Warcraft, but look at all of the unique stuff WoW had going for it. Everquest and DAoC were aging. Computers had become mainstream. Broadband internet was taking hold. Starcraft and Diablo had already put Blizzard on the map. The time was ripe. Everyone was waiting of an online game of this proportion to come out. And it was fun to play.

I don't believe this feat will ever be replicated again in a studio setting, and yet fortunes will be lost pursuing it.  Today's MMO developers need to focus on doing less, not more. Give us API's and allow users to generate their own content. Make it easier for dev's to add content on the fly. Focus on bulding the right tools. Add content as the game matures. Think small.

If you can get the MMO production cycle down to a year on a much smaller scale, but with the ability to grow as the game does (or doesn't) require, you save yourself a ton of capital, you reduce your risks, and losses are much easier to absorb. That's the direction I'd like to see.
 

There is only one reason this game failed like it has.  Poor release.  The game itself ain't bad, it's the hugely staggered release and the companies they chose to release it.

If they'd gone with a company or two that would have treated it right, supported it, and had a worldwide release within a day or two, this game would be rocking.  I followed the game in production for years, but the botched release left me disinterested.  Acclaim was a piss-poor choice, so was the mess of companies picked to handle europe.

The game was good enough to make it.  The release wasn't.

This is bad, I was hoping for the re-devolped spellborn, i like the game.

Originally posted by Honkie

There is only one reason this game failed like it has.  Poor release.  The game itself ain't bad, it's the hugely staggered release and the companies they chose to release it.

If they'd gone with a company or two that would have treated it right, supported it, and had a worldwide release within a day or two, this game would be rocking.  I followed the game in production for years, but the botched release left me disinterested.  Acclaim was a piss-poor choice, so was the mess of companies picked to handle europe.

The game was good enough to make it.  The release wasn't.

The poor release is not a reason it failed...

The money issues and management failures that caused the poor release are offcourse the real reason...

These developers where inovative and creative, but ammateurs at the same time. I even talked with them a few times in real life and they had great ideas but no money to execute them, it's just impossible to create an MMO with a team of only 20 people. 

Where people think they threw away money on the Within temptation video, its the other way around, they made money because it was the within temptation video clip they created with ingame material. No, its just impossible to create a game like this with just a few millions. 

The game died when they got intoo contact with money ravens like frogster that pushed the game to an early release instead of investing the real money needed for succes.