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?

Comments

It was a clunker

[Kirby]

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.

CyberWarrior

[molo]

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

I used to work for cyberwarrior

[Chrome3]

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.