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Rubies of Eventide MMO Shutting Down?
Bruha writes "Over at Rubies of Eventide Warcry it has been announced that the fantasy-based PC MMO Rubies of Eventide will be shutting down operations in December unless they can find some way to pay the bills. The owner of the company sent out an announcement where he said those paid up to that point will be receiving refunds and pointed out that they just did not have enough players anymore to continue: 'Our customer base continues to decline; as of yesterday we had only 806 paying customers (we lost another 41 over the weekend).'" Are there just too many MMOs out there, thus spreading players too thin, or are these problems down to the state of this particular game?
That kind of sucks... I played that MMO for awhile and liked it. It was a bit lacking on excitement I think, but overall a solid and engrossing game. Having a free download really helped it's image in my mind as well.
It was kind of sparse on players after the newbie's area. I agree that MMOGs are getting spread thin as I've basically been playing a new game every month looking for a good online home which I haven't discovered yet. There are a lot of options. Every time I've switched I've found that the grass is always greener on the other side.
This is not necessarily a sign of too many games. If no MMO games ever closed, that would be a sure sign that there weren't enough of them.
The Math Maestro Tutoring Services in Seattle
Has anyone even heard of this thing?
There really aren't that many Fantasy mmorpg's out there. Everquest, Dark Ages of Camelot, The Realm, Asheron's Call, and that pretty much covers it.
4 Games hardly covers "just too many".
Slashdot: News for 806 Nerds. Stuff that Matters to a theoretical maximum of 806 people on the planet.
I predict that this is the first of many of these stories. The industry is saturating the market with these games. I haven't played Everquest. or any of it's ilk. What I have gleaned from others complaints is that this genre demands LOTS of time. There must be a fixed amount of people in the world with the time and determination to keep playing. Flooding the market with these games is only going to disrupt the available pool of people willing to pay a monthly fee. IOW, if X amount of people are ever going to be paying a monthly fee for a massively time consuming online game, having a glut of titles nets less total players per game. We will soon see a digital "darwinism" thinning the herds of these games. Of course, it has always worked this way, with FPS and RTS games showing the pattern. However, none of these games were relying on monthly fees to make their money. Where it was easy to make a quick cash in on the RTS or FPS craze, the developers relying on subscriptions for profit are in for trouble.
How about a TMO (tiny multiplayer online)
Lets see...from the FAQ:
Can I download the game, or is it on a CD?
Rubies Of Eventide is no longer being offered on CD during open beta. Any updates are automatically downloaded after the installation of the game. All updates are mandatory to run Rubies Of Eventide.
Oh, so this never got out of beta...yet...in the same FAQ...
What do I need to play this game? What are the system requirements?
You will need an Internet connection to play Rubies Of Eventide. There is no single player version planned at this time.
Minimum System requirements are:
Pentium 4 or faster Processor
256 MB of RAM (512MB recommended)
Yet the screen shots look real bad (like something from the '90s)...and I'm certain this has to be their best screenshots...
And the whole try before you buy thing seems to have eluded them...as in the same FAQ...
Rubies of Eventide Pricing for 2003
1 month - $14.95
$35.85 for 3 months ($11.95/m) Save 20% off the standard rate!!
$65.70 for 6 months ($10.95/m) Look, over 25% off!!
$119.40 for a year ($9.95/m)Best deal for almost 35% off at $9.95 a month!!
Ok, so for a recap...
You want me to pay $15/mo to play a beta of a game that I've never heard of and obviously never played with high system requirements that looks like it's about 5 years too late with the graphics...
Ok, I can't tell why this company is having problems selling their beta game to everyone...must be the start of another games crash...
Uhhh dude, neither OpenVMS nor OS/2 is a unix operating system. And it was not an attempt to improve my karma, it was a karma-burning attempt at humor.
Ron Paul 2012
This game has potential, but was never really finished beta. It needs more content, and more fleshed out skills. The engine is also somewhat dated, pre-Everquest quality graphics. I hope something good comes of this, they seem to have good developers and good ideas, just general problems along the way.
I got a beta CD (quite a long time ago) and loaded this sucker up. The first thing I noticed was the terrible graphics - only somewhat better than Bards Tale era. This isn't necessarily the kiss of death.
But the game was just so generic. It was just another fantasy game in a crowded market, with the only interesting thing about it being that it was massively multiplayer.
I vaguely recall spending about an hour playing with it, before concluding that it was terrible, and not comparable to Asheron's Call or Everquest or Ultima Online. And when you're talking about games with a monthly fee, not to mention a sizeable time commitment, MMORPGs compete head-to-head more than traditional games do for players. There's very little reason to have chosen this one. It wasn't a hidden gem, just hidden.
-- Kate
I use VMS daily. I hate it, but I use it. I also kind of liked this game but it wasn't really finished. Certainly didn't warrent 15 bucks a month. Character models and graphics were weak, locations were fine. If it had been a bit more polished and had a bit less of a fee I might have played past the 10 days.
It is well known that the only people using windows are computer-illiterate morons, which is NOT the correct audience for a game that requires intelligence.
Hmm.. well your comment seems illiterate enough if you ask me.
I take it you are using windows/AOL, a MAC or maybe... a tv webtv?
turn the servers (and the source code?) over to hardcore fans.
Apparently a few of them don't mind it being beta... maybe they'll get some people in on it to polish it up.
I mean, even if it has to be under an NDA so the people who steward it don't sell the ideas to competing game publishers.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
and its not over yet!
There's gonna be a lot of these, then the industry will mature.
Happens in everything.
In the fallout, we are bound to pick up a lot of source code and models and textures! Excellent!
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
I used to use Cyber Warrior back in the day (the company that does Rubies). They were an ISP located in Fair Lawn, NJ with a POP in Ridgewood that I used. I used to know the sysadmin there (Hi Rich) and even got to visit the facilities. This was back in 1995 or so, and they were running the ISP on a fractional T1.
They have been developing this game the whole time too. I was just happy to have a shell account and a dialup, and never tried the game. Unfortunately, they never made much progress with the game. They had a limited following and only like 4 people working on the game. One or two developers and a couple artists.
I kinda got the impression that they were going nowhere fast. After Rich left, it seems they went downhill quickly on the ISP side of things. I'm not sure about the game side.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
I'm still waiting for that MMO Dransik to go under. No clue how that's still afloat.
We'll it appears that projections in the late 90's of the market being over x millions of players have yet to pan out. The current giants are not even US built games but ones from more broadband developed countries such as South Korea and Japan.
Once again we lag the world in broadband access where other countries are well over 60% of the population. We will continue to see this trend and the smaller games will fall off.
Even a giant such as Turbine Games is having trouble resurrecting Asheron's Call 2 from the ultimate screwup MS made of it.
WoW is following the right path. "When we are ready" and if they bone up to the claim of "More content than ACv1 today at launch" then EQ/AC2/AC/Horizons better look to their features and subscriber counts.
When I first saw this story, that's what my initial thought was: market saturation. But the numbers don't play out. The MMO industry is a gravy train for certain kinds of people, and apparently there's still a lot of room left.
I remember when DAoC was first coming out, and you had EQ fanbois on one side of the fence claiming that DAoC would die a slow death, and DAoC fanbois on the other side claiming that EQ's days were numbered. Of course, two years later, both games are wildly successful. Earlier this year, along comes SWG, and while the entry of a new MMO always dings subscriber numbers a bit, they always seem to come right back up. I'll admit that Lucasarts could put a brick in a box, and it would sell a million copies if it had a Wookie on the cover, but offline success doesn't equate to MMO success (see The Sims Online for a perfect example).
Now we have four or five major players (EQ, DAoC, SWG, FFXI), three of which are essentially clones of each other, all dominating the market. I wonder if industry experts are as confused as I am. Where are all of these people coming from? The games aren't cannibalizing from each other to any significant degree, even though logic would dictate they should. It reminds me of Tab vs. Diet Coke, I suppose I will never understand the mind of the consumer.
What does this have to do with Rubies of Eventide? It sounds as if their problem is mostly related to a poor-quality game, not a saturated MMO market. Game-stopping bugs are the calling card of the MMO, but at least they look pretty. I think RoE fails the second test.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
It appears that www.skotosnet is possibly a good place for games like these -- they currently have 10 games, including to 90's era games Meridean 59 and Underlight.
As I understand their business model, they can be less expensive for the smaller 'niche' games because they handle all the backend stuff.
-- Herder of Cats
I guess they made a few mistakes, like putting unimplemented skills in the skills list, rather than doing what other games do and bringing them in later and charging for them. But it probably had more skills actually implemented than many other such games. The content was all there, but a little hard to find. Cool if you like that kind of thing, but not if you're the typical l335t gamer. Graphics were fine when I got there.
The thing about it was it wasnt put out by an huge, evil megacorp, but a small independent company. We need to get our heads around the fact that games are like movies or bands. Little indy games are cool, like little indy movies or unsigned bands that nobody has heard of. They are not going to be as slick as stuff from the big guys perhaps, but then you are not handing over a cheque to people who would sue you at the drop of a hat.
I am amazed that people who will have nothing to do with Microsoft or Sony on the PC, will own a Playstation or XBox. It's time we wised up.
"Well, put a stake in my heart and drag me into sunlight."
Basically this is exactly what I expected from the company.
This game has been in development for ~7 years. I worked on it for a little while about 2 years ago and it had no chance of shipping. Feature creep had pushed the release date out for years. The rest of the market at the time was using 3d hardware while we still had a ray casting engine similar to doom. The combat system was horrible. The servers could barely stay online for 4 hours with 20 users before memory leaks took them down.
The company had no focus on shipping a product and was content to stay beta for half a decade.
Overall there were a lot of reasons this project didn't work out.
I'm sad to see the company go under, and I hope my old co-workers find new positions, but I can't say that it's a surprise.
It didn't fail due to market saturation at all. I wish they listed the number of people who tried the free trial of Evertide but didn't sign up. I personaly know 8 people (including myself) who tried RoE and canceled within 5 days.
We're all MMORPG veterans, we've all loved the genre, we all played EQ and DAoC till we 'exausted' those games (reached max lvl, had uber gear etc). We were starved for something new. (SWG is a joke. There is nothing to achieve in that game)
RoE failed simply because it sucks and nobody signed up after their trail. (Believe me a LOT of people tried it, the noob area was packed.
Having played RoE I am not one bit surprised that nobody signed up for the game after the trial. Here's why:
The game felt like a MMORPG aimed at the bargin bins of Walmart.
The graphics are horrid. By that I do not just mean the visual quality, which does suck pretty bad. Bad graphics are nothing new to Everquest or DAoC. No it's much worse, the game has NO sense of scale. For example you will find a castle and a warrior about 20% taller than the 'caste' door standing next to it. Walking into the said 'castle' puts you into a MUCH larger area than it looked from the outside.
The characters are not drawn anatomicaly correct. Humans have HUGE feet, all the faces are hideous etc.
Pretty bad so far, but good gameplay and enviroments could save it right?
Sadly the game has neither. The enviroment is a joke, mostly level terrain with a few shrugs here and there. It's more borring than South Ro in EQ (It's a frickign desert. But it has hills..)
Gameplay? Don't make me laugh. Combat is turn based. A first for MMORPGs, but its' also tediously dull and your control of it is very very limited. In a two words. "Not Fun". Combat needs to be fun. Say what you will but EQ combat WAS fun (unless you soloed..than it was thrilling)
Group play? Ha. You wish. You can't find groups. Half the people I found online either couldn't play or didn't want to group.
Fact is..the game just sucks. The market isn't saturated. This is just another Neocron or Mimisis headed to the MMORPG graveyard.
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Everyone wanted to play a barber.
In the Star Trek evil Mirror Universe, virtuoso cellist Yo-Yo Ma is gangsta hiphop star DJ Yo Ma-Ma.
I recall using a free trial to play this game. It was good assuming I didn't go into any towns. For some reason I'd suffer amazing lag getting in and out of towns/building/dungeons whatever. There are better games out there on the market for about the same price.
Snowblind (boards) a.k.a. Tinrock (toon), a player of the game for the last few months.
This is a "I am the Content" kinda game. We interact alot ala MUD's especially on the RolePlay server Opals.
Currently I am trying to organize WACOS We Are Content Online Society to save the game as a hobby.
We will see if it works. Core user community may drop to the 500 range, but this is enough given the quality of players. Go look at the material we have created in the Tavern. Good stuff.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra