With today's announcement that Auran Developments, the company behind the PvP MMORPG Fury, would be closing their doors, the announcement didn't really take many by surprise. Managing Editor Jon Wood offers some thoughts on why Fury wasn't the kind of success that the company had hoped.

Earlier today, we learned that Auran Developments, the company behind the MMORPG Fury, announced that they would be closing their doors. Fury itself will continue on as a free-to-play, free-to-download title, but the developers behind the game have all been laid off, and the company has “called in a Voluntary Administrator” (What Auran describes as similar to Chapter 11 in the United States) leaving only what the official announcement to the public called “a small but committed team to continue developing FURY on an ongoing basis”.

The recently announced Age of the Chosen update, we are told, will still go ahead as scheduled on Friday the 14th, making some additions and fixes to the game. The official announcement expressed optimism, saying that, “I believe that once people hear about F:AotC and the new Free to Play business model, we’ll start building up the player numbers and revenues that will make the game successful.”

With the Fury Launch date a mere two months in the past, a number of questions are raised around how this could have happened. What did Auran Developments do that led to this end?

Personally, I think that there are a number of different answers to that question. First and foremost on my list though is the fact that Fury was built on a premise that, in my opinion, was shaky to begin with.

Read the whole thing here.