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NCSoft announced yesterday that they plan to shut down all North American servers for their long-running Lineage MMORPG on June 29th. The game came out in 1998 and gradually became one of the most successful MMOs of all time, reporting over a million subscribers as much as a decade after launch. Account creation on North American servers has been disabled, subscriptions for coming months have been refunded, and existing accounts have been reactivated for free. "We will not be making any additional content updates, but we do have US Ruleset changes and lots of great events planned for the next two months. We want to give you every opportunity to make all of your remaining Lineage dreams come true. We hope that everyone will stick around to have fun with the game you love in the time we have left. We know that we have incredibly loyal fans that have stood by us for the past ten years. As painful as it was, as a business, we had to make a very difficult, but necessary, decision."

NCSoft announced yesterday that they plan to shut down all North American servers for their long-running Lineage MMORPG on June 29th. The game came out in 1998 and gradually became one of the most successful MMOs of all time, reporting over a million subscribers as much as a decade after launch. Account creation on North American servers has been disabled, subscriptions for coming months have been refunded, and existing accounts have been reactivated for free. "We will not be making any additional content updates, but we do have US Ruleset changes and lots of great events planned for the next two months. We want to give you every opportunity to make all of your remaining Lineage dreams come true. We hope that everyone will stick around to have fun with the game you love in the time we have left. We know that we have incredibly loyal fans that have stood by us for the past ten years. As painful as it was, as a business, we had to make a very difficult, but necessary, decision."

Thanks to jer0 for pointing to SirBruce's updated MMOG Subscription Growth analysis page, which tries to "chart the trend in active subscriptions" for major MMO titles using public and private data. This "major revision" has the "chart separated into three tiers" dependent on subscription size, and shows Lineage as the worldwide MMO leader at "just under 2.7 million" (though this may be reliant on bulk 'PC Baang' subscriptions in countries such as South Korea, and the game has "only 7,000 [subscribers] in the United States.") Other notable entries include City Of Heroes ("surpassed 180,000 subscribers... proof that a well-executed MMOG can still garner substantial numbers even in the current competitive climate"), and the also recently launched, but less successful Horizons ("After peaking at around 35,000 subscribers, they have since fallen to somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 subscribers.")

Thanks to Yahoo News/Reuters for their story discussing the problems associated with online gaming addiction in MMO-crazy South Korea. According to the article, a 12 year-old named Lim's "love affair with the fantasy game [Lineage] saw him fall foul of the law after he stole $16,000 from his father and ran away to feed a passion for online gaming." This issue is particularly marked in Korea since "...about 70 percent of South Korea's 48 million people have access to the Internet, with 11 million using high-speed services, the world's highest broadband penetration rate." The article ends with the note that, "while some game industry alliances have been pushing game makers and distributors to provide purchasing guidelines, the likelihood of authorities imposing regulations that may pull the plug on a lucrative 500 billion won [$420 million] industry seems unlikely."

Thanks to InsertCredit for pointing to a 4Gamer.net story including pictures of Coca-Cola cans featuring characters from PC MMORPG Lineage II. The promotion, due to start in South Korea next week, shows how relatively mainstream Lineage 2 and its prequel have become in that country, with a previous story noting "in [Lineage 2's] first five days in release, publisher NCsoft has tallied more than 130,000 paid users." The original Lineage's success in Asia, with "more than three million subscribers and more than three hundred thousand concurrent users", has enabled the company to expand into the U.S., where they are funding Richard Garriott's mysterious new MMO Tabula Rasa (of which there's previously unseen concept art available), as well as the superhero MMO title City Of Heroes and non-subscription MMO Guild Wars. The official Lineage II FAQ notes that "development on a North American version of the game is nearing beta testing stage", and the Unreal-engine title is likely to launch some time early in 2004.

Thanks to GameSpot for their story revealing Korean MMORPG Lineage II has racked up significant amounts of initial subscribers in its native country. According to the article about the Unreal-engine PC sequel, "in the game's first five days in release, publisher NCsoft has tallied more than 130,000 paid users." However, SirBruce's subscription page points out that many subscribers to the initial, 4-million subscriber Lineage: The Blood Pledge "play in 'PC baangs', Internet cybercafes in [South] Korea that buy Lineage access from the company and then sell it at hourly rates to customers", making subscriber comparisons with games like Star Wars Galaxies more difficult. Elsewhere, GI.Biz reveals the PlayStation 2 is the most popular console in Korea, although only 600,000 strong, with 92.5 percent preferring it over the 60,000-selling Xbox, as "...players cited the lack of Korean language software and poor customer service as their key problems with the Xbox."

Thanks to Origin for their news release announcing Lord British is returning to the world of PC MMORPG Ultima Online. The article trails: "Talk circulates throughout the land of the return of a figure from Britannia's past, whose whereabouts have been shrouded in mystery for these many moons", and GameShark has contacted NCSoft Austin, where Ultima creator Richard 'Lord British' Garriott now works (and where he has even introduced Lord British's character into Lineage), and reports that "Richard Garriott... gave [Origin/EA] permission to reintroduce the character into the world of Ultima. Origin apparently made a deal with Richard that allowed them to use the character if they had Richard's blessings."

Wtcher writes "Bruce Woodcock has cobbled together a chart recording the growth of various massive multiplayer online games in subscriber numbers, relative to each other. I just found it interesting to see a visual summary of how well each MMOG was doing compared to one another." Apart from Lineage, which is omitted because the author says "trying to compare it to other MMOGs is almost like comparing apples to oranges", it seems that Everquest is still way out there in front, but there's a number of more recently-launched titles jockeying for position in this very competitive market.