Oh this is heartbreaking and more than a bit frustrating:
Worlds Adrift was an ambitious undertaking for us: a community crafted MMO built on freedom and player agency with multiplayer physics, set in a huge world...
However, Worlds Adrift just hasn’t reached the level of popularity it needs to continue. The challenges that came with our ambitious project meant that all our work went into making the game work rather than making it the experience we wanted it to be. As a result we failed at making a game that could capture the imaginations of millions. Creating an MMO like Worlds Adrift is a huge financial commitment and unfortunately the game is just no longer commercially viable.
I've been following Worlds Adrift as a fan for years, because it had all the markings of an incredibly ambitious MMO/virtual world crossover that could potentially bring hundreds of thousands of players together; in fact, it's arguably the most ambitious single-shard MMO that's currently playable on the market right now. Or rather, was.
Even more disappointing, Worlds Adrift was among the most ambitious MMOs deployed on Improbable's Spatial OS technology, which was designed to make truly massive, single-shard MMOs possible. But as I reported last March, the company has mostly been moving away from single-shard MMOs:
In the short term, however, as Thomas explains, the main goal is to support "all kinds of games", as opposed to single-shard MMOs... Why? For the most part, there's just not as much market interest in single-shard MMOs in the EU and North America -- or as he puts it: "In the Eastern regions, massive interest there, but in the Western regions, yeah, it tends to be more session-based type games." Then again, we are still seeing interesting uses of the platform -- for instance, Thomas mentions Mavericks, a 1000 player battle royale with persistent, virtual world-type elements.
There is one other single-shard MMO using Spatial OS: Seed, the world-colonizing game. And fortunately, that project is still going strong. (More on that soon.) Still, it's frustrating to find few other developers willing to work on massive MMOs.
I figured I'd comment here even though the post is about a year old but really it showcases how bad things can get in just a year's time. The developers of SpatialOS is quite in trouble after games like World Adrift and a number of others have bounced off their engine.
gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-03-04-improbables-losses-rose-65-percent-last-year-to-63-7-million
Posted by: V | Sunday, March 08, 2020 at 04:39 PM