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.