Masthead Studios has announced that service for Earthrise will cease as of today, Thursday, February 9th. According to Atanas Atanasov, Director of Masthead Studios, the team felt that Earthrise had been released too early and never managed to meet its players' expectations.

Here is the announcement in its entirety:

Masthead Studios announced today that it will be shutting down the Earthrise servers on 9th of February.

“One year after the launch of the game, we have decided to stop the Earthrise servers. Earthrise was released too early and did not meet the expectations of its fans” said Atanas Atanasov, Director of Masthead Studios. “We did our best to revive the game in 2011, but the time was not enough to keep up with the user requirements. There is a huge interest in high quality open world sandbox MMORPGs, unfortunately the big publishers do not show any interest in the genre. It is unfortunate that low budget companies like ours are trying to bring innovativeness in the already saturated MMO market. I hope that one day an independent studio will be able to release the long anticipated open world sandbox MMO, which everyone is talking about, but no one is making. We tried, but did not succeed. We would like to apologize to those who were disappointed from Earthrise and to thank everyone who supported us during the years.”

The free to play version of Earthrise, which was planned for 2012 may be released only if there is investor or publisher interest.

Check out the Earthrise site for more information. As yet, this announcement is not live on the web page.