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Uru to close again

February 4th, 2008 (Visited 1046 times) Tags:

Gamasutra - GameTap Shuttering Myst Online: Uru Live

It lives, then it dies, then it lives again, then it dies again…

“The decision was a very difficult one and was made for business reasons…”

One wonders what the minimum sustainable population of paying users is for an MMO these days, and why the overhead seems to have gotten so high.

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19 Responses to “Uru to close again”

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Myst Online: URU Live Forums :: View topic - What killed uru wrote on February 5th, 2008 at 10:55 am:

[...] pm — Post subject: To make URU live was an expensive venture. This is from a developer on Ralph Koster’s Game [...]

Reader Comments

David McGraw said on February 4th, 2008 at 3:30 pm:
MMOs can’t live forever, can they? I’m not sure I want to see UO or EQ, 30 years from now.
Raph said on February 4th, 2008 at 3:45 pm:

Why not? There are text worlds from the 80s still running. AxL has a nice list of some of the oldest Dikus still running, all of which date from the early 90s.
tallimar said on February 4th, 2008 at 5:15 pm:
UO would probably have been a good game still had EA decided not to mettle and also try to keep the original design team on board (or even allow UO2, imo). maybe the question isnt so much as ‘can a virtual world last forever’, but more like ‘how long can a setting last until the intended feel becomes too diluted to feel continuous’?
Mike Rozak said on February 4th, 2008 at 5:35 pm:
Something like Uru would have been particularly expensive because eye-candy-laden puzzles are more work than fields of rats.

My off-the-cuff guess is that they had around 10-ish people at a minimum: 1-2 programmers, several 3D artists (modellers, texturer, animator), sound person, 1-2 testers, 5(?) product support (and NPC actors?), a couple management, one marketing, and one designer in a pear tree. It would be hard to be smaller and keep up with the expected Myst quality of art/content. (Note: I could be way off too. Someone else can chime in.)

I think that’s 17 people… about $1.7M per year. Divide by $168 for subs, and get approximately 10K players. (Not including servers, data, and other overheads.)

Sadly, this failure only bolsters the diku-mud evolutionary branch. It seems we’ll see more rats and fewer puzzles in future MMOs.
Elita said on February 4th, 2008 at 9:52 pm:
and I just canceled my gametap subscription an hour ago.

Eve on Steam, hmmmm? I love Portal, considering it is single player and first person shooter, that is amazing… as a general rule I hate both.

Someone somewhere is eventually going to get my money. I just hope they plan on keeping it… if they add a multi-player aspect to Portal, I am sold!
Skip said on February 5th, 2008 at 6:15 am:
The only MUD I spent any particular amount of time on was the Discworld MUD, and that was in the early to mid 90s. I wonder if my toon is still in the player database? I might have to log in and check it out, if I can remember my password.
Ilsoap said on February 5th, 2008 at 8:24 am:
I wasn’t actually aware of Uru’s existence… when did it start?
Joshua McClure said on February 5th, 2008 at 9:15 am:
I’m really sad to see a world go away like this with no lasting memory. I say world because it’s real to the people who inhabit it. I know you share that thought, Raph. In some ways, I think it’s “unreal” to destroy a world because of a business decision. Echos of Hitchhikers Guide anyone?

UO inadvertently released it’s code (or DNA, if you will) before it acquired business cancer and mutated into the two headed reject it is today. Because of that it’s children still exist today…see uogamers.com, etc. Some of these fan organizations have over 50,000 active users and simultaneous user per server ranging from 800-1500. That’s an impressive legacy to leave, for a game as old as UO.

If life is in the DNA, then UO still lives. I hate to see MO commit seppuku without direct offspring.
David McGraw said on February 5th, 2008 at 10:30 am:
>> Why not?

That’s around 15 years, not quite 30. And they are also Text MUDS that require little to no maintenance. Do you really think companies are really going to want to maintain their world forever? If a company keeps maintaining all of the worlds that they have built in the past 30 years, then that is really burdening their very own progression abilities. Some day they’ll stop supporting it and then we’ll have to rely on fan bases to host servers for nostalgia purposes in the future.

It’s a part of the software life cycle.
Raph said on February 5th, 2008 at 2:42 pm:

That’s around 15 years, not quite 30. And they are also Text MUDS that require little to no maintenance.

True, it isn’t 30 years yet. But historically, virtual worlds have had to be actively killed, they don’t tend to die on their own once they reach a critical mass.

Text muds require quite a lot of maintenance, dunno what you mean there.
Rik said on February 5th, 2008 at 4:41 pm:
Sometimes I think you guys disagree with Raph just to disagree. Sure new content costs money, but keeping the servers running without new content seems like it shouldn’t cost too much, and if people are still paying why not do so? If you’re part of a larger company that runs MMOs, why not turn some of the new guys loose on “that old world that’s never going to make any real money” and tweak stuff while they better learn how these games function.

One wonders what the minimum sustainable population of paying users is for an MMO these days, and why the overhead seems to have gotten so high.

Those seem like good questions to me.
David McGraw said on February 5th, 2008 at 10:28 pm:
>> Sometimes I think you guys disagree with Raph just to disagree.

No way! We wouldn’t do that! We just like to spark a conversation that is thought provoking.

But, yeah… Only time will tell. MMOs are incredibly young. It’ll be interesting.
Jason said on February 6th, 2008 at 7:22 am:
I can totally understand stopping production of new content… but, to me, turning off the server means that the subscriptions have to be not enough to support powering the existing hardware and paying 1 person to restart the server when it crashes.

In this case, however, since Uru switched over to be free to play for Gametap subscribers, the question of money becomes how long Gametap is willing to foot the bill… I guess the answer is “until April 4th”.

It’s sad though, I just started playing around with it and was really enjoying myself.
Swift Voyager said on February 7th, 2008 at 1:50 pm:
As long as the business model is sound and the company doesn’t bleed money into wastefull side projects, then an MMO should be able to sustain itself forever. However, you also need to look at profitability in relation to other ventures the company may want to persue. If an MMO runs on too slim of a margin, then I can understand companies wanting to cut overhead in favor of projects with larger RoI.
Dominic Gugas said on February 9th, 2008 at 4:36 pm:
“I can totally understand stopping production of new content… but, to me, turning off the server means that the subscriptions have to be not enough to support powering the existing hardware and paying 1 person to restart the server when it crashes.”

Not quite - the decision is “Are the subscriptions worth as much as I could be making running some other game on this hardware (once I’ve factored in the cost of getting the replacement game up and running)”

The hard-nosed business decision isn’t answered by ‘Can I break even’ but by ‘What’s the return on investment’.

Now, here’s the question that interests me - should there be a charitable foundation that ‘rescues’ games due to be turned off? Is it worth finding the money to keep a server up and running for games that are no longer good business propositions - for historical and cultural interest, as well as to support that last handful of fans? Would game companies wilingly sign over their rights in something they were going to close down? Would anyone fund such a foundation?
Stopher said on February 10th, 2008 at 12:40 am:
WOW, that is a brilliant idea.

Would anyone fund such a thing? It would require the companies to give all the rights over to someone else…. but you wouldn’t turn all the superloyal fans into super virulent enemies either.

IF such a thing occurred, then the CUSTOMER would be in charge of the product NO? The customers could “buy in” shares and appoint a board of trustees. The game would need someone to ease them into a non-profit status with transparent financial transactions. There would have to be at least an employee or two and the “customer-owners” through their board of trustees could interview, hire, and fire accordingly. THEN if they were financially sound, they might even have folks create more content (especially if there were programmers amongst the “customer-owners”).

This could be very liberating for “dying” games. I recall the story of the death of an online game and it was very touching. They even had a big nasty monster to fight just before the power was shut off. Nice touch, but what if the customers could control the game… Could be very interesting.

Now you just need a millionaire philanthropist that plays games to create the foundation. Good luck with that.
Rik said on February 10th, 2008 at 4:43 am:
I don’t know that it needs to be a millionare, check out what’s up with Earth and Beyond MMO.

http://www.enb-emulator.com/

Now, I’m not saying this example is legal, just that the fans will step forward.
Dr. Cat said on February 11th, 2008 at 6:30 am:
I really wonder how many online games have A) computing needs that are expensive by today’s standards, or B) are keeping specific machines busy that are up to date enough that anyone would consider re-using them for a new game if they were to shut down the old one. Any machine 5 years old or more is probably “junk” to most people, given how fast computers improve. Unless they’re going to run a fairly undemanding game, they’d probably just as soon buy/lease new machines for their next online game anyway.

I know Castle Infinity, back in the mid 90s, was rescued from extinction by some fan who got permission from Starwave to literally take the old server machines out of their dumpster, rather than let them get carried off by the garbage men. It still had all the software on it, they were able to get it running again.

I also know Furcadia started out on a Pentium 90, was able to serve at least a few hundred simultaneous players from it. We have that machine & the second machine sitting around in a closet, haven’t found any compelling reason yet to plug them in, though someday I want to get the old historical data off ‘em. Currently we run on a machine we just moved to with four dual core 2 gigahertz CPUs, 16 gigs RAM, and 3 SCSI drives for RAID storage. Leasing it, plus a web server and email server machine, plus the terabytes of bandwidth, all costs us around 5% of what the game makes in revenues from an estimated 60,000 players. 95% to 98% of whom never spend any money on the game. If we ever stopped paying all the staff & just wanted to pay to keep the server machine running, it’d be pretty trivial to come up with the funding to do so forever.

Of course it’s a bad example, as Furcadia is way at the low end of operating costs for a big online game. (Or the high end of cost efficiency, as I like to look at it!) But a lot of the small and hobbyist-run and web-based games probably have low operating costs as well - and probably anything over 7-8 years old would need computing resources that are pretty cheap now. Likely today’s games will too, when we look at the computers of a decade from now.