Another MMORPG joins the ranks of the fallen as Face of Mankind announced recently that their MMORPG is canceled, citing financial issues as the first reason.

We all know that you are eagerly awaiting Face of Mankind: Rebirth and we are very greatful that you stayed with us. This makes the following announcement even more sad for us.

The development of Face of Mankind: Rebirth has been canceled. There are several reasons for this decision, of which some you might understand and others you won't. The main reason is the lack of financial resources to develop the game and finish it the way we want. FoM, as many other MMORPGs today, is a game that relies heavily on visual content. For us, being only a small development studio with very limited resources, it would be nearly impossible to make the game we want it to be. You might wonder what there is to change? It runs fine and works in a way. That's right, but not the way it's supposed to. And spending so much more power and private funding into the project made not much sense anymore. There might be a time for FoM in the future, but it's just not now.

We thought about several ways to get the financing done. We tried finding a new publisher or getting investments from other sources. The best solution for the game would have been a publisher who is not solely interested in making quick money. Especially when it comes to MMO's, that have so much financial potential, the only way to go is careful development, testing and a well planned release. This doesn't necessarily have to mean a big multi-million budget. Many games are just oversized these days.

After all, this is not the end for Duplex Systems. We have tons of ideas and plans and are fully dedicated to develop those MMO's that the current market needs. In a certain way, I have to admit that FoM was oversized as well. We accomplished more than we were actually supposed to for such a small company. Many wondered if Duplex Systems was just a one-man show. Altogether this is obviously not true, but at times it was. And it made me crash down physically by the end of 2005. Even though I was able to bring the development of FoM to an end, it made me change my life and the way I run business drastically.

Beyond many other ideas, I always had the idea of a game that doesn't rely so much on graphical resources, but is more module based and generated in a way, and in the end could be done pretty well by a one or two man team. During the latest months I made this idea more concrete and developed a game concept for it. The result is Nanoverse Online, a very fresh concept in the MMO realm. At this time I don't plan to release any kind of details just yet. This is to keep our ideas safe and unique, which I hope you will understand.

Check it out here.