Shadowbane closing

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Apr 172009
 

Shadowbane has been defeated, and will close on May 1st. Not much notice given!

  6 Responses to “Shadowbane closing”

  1. Todd says:
    April 17, 2009 at 4:52 pm

    Not surprising, unfortunately. The switch to an add-supported model for the game was eyebrow-raising, but I think doing a full pwipe was probably the beginning of the end.

  2. Sebastian says:
    April 17, 2009 at 6:11 pm

    I wonder what will happen to the successful/unsuccessful MMO ratio, especially with this little recession we’re in. It was already pretty low, but I can’t imagine people are too willing to sign up to new subscriptions.

    Of course, the existing subscriber services are probably laughing at the moment 🙂

    I also wonder how many more MMOs are failing before even being announced to the public. I can’t imagine it’s fun to be developing an MMO right now, unless your funding is incredibly secure.

  3. Beau says:
    April 18, 2009 at 5:35 am

    I don’t see that many failing at all. If you take into account all the indie games and smaller ones you have got so many choices going on.

    Look at all the Eastern market imports, a new one of those pops up every week! Perhaps some of the NA “major label” stuff is having some issues, but just like in music, there is still so much going on.

    Beau

  4. Arrakiv says:
    April 18, 2009 at 8:50 am

    Looks like their reboot didn’t totally work. To be honest, this has been a long time coming.

  5. Yukon Sam says:
    April 20, 2009 at 6:29 am

    Shadowbane was always a niche product; the fact that they lasted this long indicates a commendable understanding of that niche.

    But we should dance on the corpse and call them n00bs. They’d want it that way.

  6. Derek Licciardi says:
    April 20, 2009 at 10:54 am

    Shadowbane was a nice experiment. Something that lasted longer than I thought it would but suffered from the same problem that all PvP centric games suffer from. Lack of real control or ownership. In Shadowbane, that was made very clear by the ease with which an opposing city could level your city, something that took months to build. In most other games it’s clear once you realize you’re playing a grand game of capture the flag.

    To Shadowbane’s credit, there were some real signs of brilliance at times. What they tried to achieve only failed because of a few design decisions in my opinion. Obviously, guys like Damion could shed more light on the matter but from the outside looking in, Shadowbane was a refreshing take on an otherwise repetitive and derivative MMO market. It’s too bad it never made The Leap and I hope that it’s death doesn’t signal yet more rounds of PvP games cannot be mass market. Even with Shadowbane’s failure, I’m not convinced PvP games can’t be mass market.

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