I could have seen the listed MMO's getting their plugs pulled because they weren't doing too hot, and there is no way that 2009 is the death of MMO's considering the continuing strength of WoW and other games like Everquest II, Warhammer, and EVE Online. The Star Wars MMO is also arriving soon.
Don't say that yet. First of all, all those games sucked. Second, dude SW:TOR is going to be coming out. It may not be a competing product to WoW, but it will have a healthy following.
I'm guessing i'ts mostly because Hellgate London and Tabular Rasa didn't live up to expectation, Shadowbane has been around so long i'm surprised anyone still cares about it, and RF Online got fucked over because codemasters are lazy, greedy pricks.
Also, don't forget Lich King dropped this year, several free to play MMO's were released, an Eve Online expansion (coupled with boxed re-release) impending releases of Diablo III, Champions and Star Trek online, as well as a schedule major graphical update to Anarchy online on the way. I guess there was just no more money to be made from Matrix Online.
Well in the case of Hellgate London and Tabula Rosa, both of those were sort of a "failure to launch" scenario. Shadowbane and Matrix Online, on the other hand, have been struggling for years. I suspect that those good old economic stressers finally for the better of them in this crap economy and they had to shutter down.
But fret not! While SOE is closing the Matrix Online, it is also opening DC Universe Online and the Agency, which both look pretty inventive in the MMO space. I think the thing that will revitalize the genre is people creating something substantially different from WoW, for people who want something different from that experience. Plus, none of us may play them, but free-to-play MMOs have blown up over the last year and a half.
So in short, unless you're WoW, Everquest or FFXI, maintaining the traditional model may become more difficult. But all the more excuse to innovate now.
@PureRok: You paid a subscription fee. We can argue about semantics if you want but, a fee is still a ... [more]
You didn't have to pay a fee. I own the game, I know. There was a fee if you wanted to pay it for some special things, but you could still play. A fee does not equal MMO. The game was anything but "massively multiplayer". That's like calling Diablo 2 an MMO.
I think Age of Conan will probably be next. They're really cutting it close, and while it'll probably take a little bit longer, I don't see any profit coming from that game.
I think it's probably just a coincidence that they all ended recently. It's bound to happen eventually though. Not all MMO's can be sucessful. The format is, by defenition, dependent on maintaining a relatively high user base, but with so many MMO's coming out within the last few years, that user base has got to be spread pretty thin for some games. I used to play WoW, and as much as I had interest in other MMO's, I just didn't have the time to play more than one at a time, and I doubt there are many people out there that can. So when a game like WoW is as successful as it is, other games suffer. If anything, I can see MMO's getting more popular as time goes on, but there's just not enough room for everybody. The players get the worst of it. They put in all the time into this game, only to watch helplessly as it becomes obsolete. Could you imagine that happening with other types of games. Say, for instance, you go to play some old Super Nintendo, or Playstation game, only to find out that you no longer have access to it. Ouch.
Ok fine, money is still money, and lots of people payed money towards it only to be kicked in the teeth. I'm sad to hear it didn't have a monthly fee though, I would've played it if I knew that at the time, looked like a lot of fun.
Edit: Ok so maybe it was optional, but it was in fact still a fee to be payed monthly to access that extra content. Like I said above money is still money, and it's sad to see games like this getting shut down.
I'm pretty sure paying a subscription fee alone doesn't make something an MMO. On those grounds you would have to call all Xbox Live games MMO's and also considering the fact that many of the more popular MMO's are free kinda busts a hole in your theory.
I'm not implying that, i'm just saying that money is money, and people put money and time into the game so it's a kick in the balls for them to see it die.
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