Ubisoft To Shut Down Shadowbane

tyen writes "Ubisoft has announced the shutdown of Shadowbane, the first major, fantasy role-playing MMO with true PVP (full asset destruction possible). The shutdown will take place in about two weeks, at the start of May. No official reason has been given by Ubisoft, but running an MMO for free for the past three years, with no significant improvement in market growth during that period, could play a part in the decision. There's been no response from Ubisoft yet on calls to open source the code. "

Comments

Shadowbane was amazing

[Segod]

I played it for about a year and a half when it was new. It had a pretty decent following though nothing anywhere near the level of something like WoW.

It was really fun though especially during a "bane". For those who didn't play, a bane was when you effectively declared war on someone else's city. Once set up, each side was given a set amount of time to prepare (like a day or a week or something, I forget) and then once it went off, all of the town's buildings were vulnerable and if you destroyed their tree of life, their town was taken over by the other team. Shadowbane wasn't about gold, loot or missions though there was plenty of that. It was about full on guild vs guild battles. I've never really found a MMO with quite the same experience. So this is very sad for me even though I have no time to play a game like this anyway.

Ultimately, I think it was killed by griefers, people who didn't like PvP leaving the game and constant crashing that they didn't fully fix until about the time I stopped playing.

Re:Shadowbane was amazing

[SupremoMan]

I thought the game was an experiment to see how many bugs a person can tolerate.

Re:Possible reason?

[hairyfeet]

Well then the problem is they don't know HOW to make money on this game. The answer? Micro transactions. Both of my boys are playing "free" MMORPGs and both have been working extra hard around the house so we would put money on a Walmart Visa so they could buy little things in the games, like new characters and armor. With micro transactions I don't have to worry about shelling out cash every month just to keep their characters from being lost and the game companies get cash. Seems like a win/win to me.

I truly believe that with the exception of WoW and maybe a few others that monthly subscriptions will simply die out. In uncertain times like these nobody wants to invest the cash when they don't know what is coming next. With micro transactions if I have a bad month at the shop I don't have to worry about the boys losing their stuff because I'm a little short of cash and it makes it quite easy to get them to do chores because it equals an extra buck or two to buy new gear, so win/win for me. But if they haven't made any cash off of Shadowbane in 3 years then they simply haven't been doing it right. I bet with micro transactions even if Shadowbane isn't that popular it would still have a big enough revenue stream to keep it going and generate a little profit.

With the economy in the dumps you simply have to go with what works and from the looks of its popularity in Asia I'd say that micro transactions are the way to go. Because I truly doubt that the WoW style subscription model is going to work out long term. It is simply too risky. But you could mix micro transactions with say ads for your other products(as well as advertisers) and keep enough of a revenue stream that even a small user base would generate enough cash to make it worth keeping. So while I haven't played Shadowbane it sounds like Ubisoft simply didn't know how to capitalize on what they had. But the only way subscription based makes sense is if you can get and keep a quite large user base and there are simply not enough MMORPG players to go around and too many of those are locked in to WoW.

What?

[Dyinobal]

I have never actually heard of this MMO, so I guess perhaps marketing fail on their part.

Re:What?

[Trecares]

Because it was released 6 years ago. It was a novel game for it's time. A lot of original elements in the game. The mechanics of it were pretty fun. Unfortunately the game had tons of problems, bugs, class balance issues, and severe lag also. Large scale combat would frequently overload the servers and make it impossible to do anything. At most probably only 100 players per side was sort of okay. But at that time, it was fairly common for battles to have upwards of 200-300 people, per side. That was due to the formation of alliances among guilds, and some guilds managing to attain a large membership, over a thousand players. Once people had been driven away by all the bugs, exploits and other issues, the game never recovered. I came back years later and it was pretty much empty. Another victim of an "early" launch. A few more months, and more testing and it could have been much better.

Trecares

Re:What?

[securitytech]

If you played any mmorpg's at all 6 years ago, it would have been very difficult to not hear about Shadowbane or see one of it's adds.

Besides it being a top 5 game in terms of population, there was little competition then, UO, Everquest, heck SWG wasn't even released 6 years ago. Although I never played it for any length of time, Shadowbane reviews, adds, etc were on every gaming site I frequented...not sure how you could have missed them unless you used AOL or something.

Re:Possible reason?

[Solitude]

I would never, ever play a microtransaction game. I've been playing since my 7x GM tankmage in UO, 50 druid in EQ1, Doctor/Bounty Hunter in SWG (pre NGE), and current 75 mage in WoW. Along the way I've tried EQ2, Asheron's Call, AC2, AO, AoC, Vanguard, and LOTRO. I've never had a character deleted. I've come back 1, 2, 3 years later either paid or during free come back promotions and my characters have always been there.

I would never play a game with ads in it either.

Want your MMORPG to succeed? Fix the bugs. Don't let overpowered classes/specs/builds run rampant for too long (i.e. crossbows, tamers in UO, combat medics in SWG, rogues in WoW). Make new content. Set up a decent grind.

The subscription model is in no danger of dying.

behind the Shadowbane curtain

[SethJohnson]

I once hit up a friend of mine for a job who worked at Shadowbane's developer, Wolfpack Studios. I was hoping to work on the back end database. Turned out they didn't have a formal rdbms behind the game. All player data, etc. was stored in flat files. I offered to help migrate them to a more reliable, higher performance database architecture, but they weren't interested. I think the lifecycle of the product had moved beyond architecture development and they only had the budget for ongoing maintenance (circa 2003).

Seth

Re:PvP

[SeekerDarksteel]

Shadowbane's group v group combat was very interesting. Unfortunately it was about the only thing worthwhile about the game. The completely open nature of pvp did make running around solo or in small groups a pain in the ass, and there was massive class disparity. But there was just something about 10 v 10 group combat that no other game has seemed to get the same. One of my fondest memories of the game was when my guild was defending a mine. We had one priest, one bard, and 8 crossbow warriors. One guy would call out a target and all the crossbowmen would skewer the target. We held off three consecutive groups that way.

The only other thing that I liked was the extremely flexible nature of character classes. A single class could have many different viable builds, each one drastically different. The same class could be a super-high defense low damage tank, a high-damage decent defense melee dps, or a decent ranged nuker. Some of the builds were in fact completely unintentional and only came about due to experimentation.

Re:Not done yet

[edremy]

Fighting for scraps? Not really, when you consider those "scraps" would have been considered major successes in the pre-WoW days- 200k subscribers was thought to be a high end number. There's plenty of room in the MMO market and quite a few thriving MMOs- you just have to find a niche that's not "Generic fantasy PvE MMO" because WoW has that sewed up. Lord of the Rings Online is doing well based on the lore and built in story, WAR and AoC are contracting but there's a market for the PvP oriented games, and EVE is doing well in the "economic simulation for psychopaths" arena

Re:Not done yet

[ThePsion5]

EVE is doing well in the "economic simulation for psychopaths" arena

I object to this ignorant oversimplification of EVE's player demographic. I have absolutely no interest in economic simulations!

Re:Possible reason?

[hairyfeet]

Uuuhhh....you are making a critical error. You must NEVER underestimate the power of the bling. both of my boys have bought crap for their characters on their games that does NOTHING to their stats or abilities. Why? "Because it makes my character look cooler" according to them. It is NO different that stupid ring tones or leopard skin seat covers. Folks will buy all kinds of crap if they think it looks cool. And by keeping the price on the bling low you make it an impulse buy.

And THAT is why I think micro transactions are the way to go:impulse buys. Folks that would balk at shelling out $20 a month for yet another MMORPG have NO problem shelling out a buck for some out fit that makes their battle mage look sharp. And since you keep the price small folks don't notice over time how those little bling bling impulse buys add up. A buck here or $2.50 there doesn't hurt anyone's wallet while at the same time bring much needed revenue to the company. Besides look at it this way: Ubisoft is closing down Shadowbane for lack of revenue,right? So what would it have hurt to try micro transactions? After all the are just going to let all the work go to waste now anyway, so why not give it a try? Can't be any worse than the total fail the Ubisoft has on their hands now, could it?