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Wish Cancelled
Shockeye writes "According to Mutable Realms' website, the Wish project has been cancelled after 'careful consideration of all the facts and analyzing all the data which we have gathered from the Wish Beta 2.0 test.' The beta test for the Wish project will close at 6pm EST. According to the message it also seems Mutable Realms will be closing as well. You can view the short message here, and over at f13.net we are discussing the latest casualty to the MMOG scene."
I don't know the inside details, but they opened up their beta test to something like 10,000 people on January 1st while promising 58,000 more that they would get in as the week progressed.
Eight days later the project is cancelled.
Sounds like somebody got their first bandwidth bill.
In the gaming world today almost nobody actually owns the code they work with so pipe dreams like GPLing failed projects just won't happen. The $100,000 that you paid to license somebody else's middleware only give you the right to use it for a year, not to give away the source code for free. Ripping out all the proprietary, licensed bits means a lot of hard work for absolutely no return on the investment.
The people who pay for this kind of development really hate footing the bill for that kind of thing.
WISH made some noises about being the first "ultra" massively multiplayer online game, where "ultra massive" was defined as "over 10,000 players online at once in a single game world".
EVE: Online (a space based mmorpg) did this back in April of '04.
It's not impossible, but it is difficult. I guess they weren't up to it.
~Lake
P.S. Aside from just the user record, EVE is a pretty cool game and worth checking out. Very different than other MMORPGs out there. Kind've a modern mmorpg of Elite or Escape Velocity.