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Sony Shutting Down Star Wars Galaxies MMO and TCG
flibbidyfloo writes "Sony has sent an email to current and former subscribers to its long-running MMO Star Wars Galaxies explaining that the service will be shut down in December. Here's an excerpt from the email: 'We write to you today to inform you that on December 15, 2011, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) and LucasArts will end all services (MMO and Trading Card Game) for Star Wars Galaxies (SWG). The shutdown of SWG is a very difficult decision, but SOE and LucasArts have mutually agreed that the end of 2011 is the appropriate time to end the game ... In addition, we will be discontinuing the sale of all Star Wars Galaxies Trading Card Game (TCG) digital card packs as of today, June 24, 2011. Loot cards will not be redeemable in the SWG MMO after September 15, 2011. The TCG will continue to operate until the final service closure on December 15, 2011.'"
Can you imagine paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars on eBay for something that only exists in one of these games, then finding out a few weeks, months, or years later that it's going into the bit-bucket at the end of the month?
..hack the servers and keep them open for another year or so? I mean.. their so good at keeping the servers offline, let's see if they can keep them online!
This is why when companies decommission their software, they should just open source it and let everyone go nuts. Someone somewhere is bound to maintain a gaming server for this game. However, companies like Sony have the mentality where if they can't make money off it then no one shall have it.
If you have a mother, and she's proud of you, that's a shame.
I'm surprised it has taken Sony this long to shut it down. Sony turned a great mmo into absolute shit. They even had a small window to rectify their mistakes by listening to the vast majority of players. Fortunately, there is the star wars galaxy emulation project, which is a pre-cu version of the server. There are plenty of people on there (almost certainly more than the official swg), and you don't have to pay a monthly fee. The only thing I am leery of is Sony pulling a Blizzard and shutting them down. For anyone interested, the url is www.swgemu.com.
Star Wars Old Republic from Bioware
http://www.swtor.com/
As if tens of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced
At least with a meatspace game, like the trading cards, players will have a piece of memorabilia that may be of value to someone, if not as much as it means to them.
But when your collectibles are stored in an array that will never be loaded to RAM ever again, it's not even possible to be surprised on finding them in the attic while looking for your high school transcripts...
It's dead, Jim - Chewbacca
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
My June 2007 article in the online gaming magazine The Escapist about the 2005 "New Game Enhancements" that pretty much destroyed Star Wars Galaxies: "Blowing Up Galaxies"
The real reason Sony is shutting down the game? They discovered it occasionally caused sudden onset of acute Tourettes syndrome.
That might work for simple online games where it's mostly about the gameplay (say, EA sports games), but for anything with persistent objects that have value because of their scarcity, it won't make a difference. You need a secure central database/service to prevent hacking, duplicating objects, or whatever other form of cheating people can come up with.
If you let anyone run a mint, money will rapidly lose its value :)
Already been done, for the MMO. They're also making is better, by not adding the game-killing idiot-friendly "upgrades" that SOE added. See SWGEmu.
Not sure about the TCG. A "digital TCG" is utterly stupid, IMNSHO.
Seriously folks. I don't buy games that don't have private or dedicated servers. Would it really be such a bad thing if little groups of players could host their own worlds? They can't really compete with the experience of the main servers, but at least some people would be able to play, even after the game's plug has been pulled.
Some determined players have done so with WoW by reverse engineering the client server protocol, so I gave it a spin -- It wasn't my cup of tea, but my brother became a subscriber because of the added exposure -- That's right: Blizzard made money because a private server existed.
Some people don't have the time to grind forever -- the private servers can have different exp rates; WoW and RuneScape servers I've seen do, anyway. One such WoW server almost won me over due to the benefits afforded to the time-challenged player.
It's really a shame that games have to die at all. Welcome to the future folks. There is some hope, some FPS franchises still have dedicated servers that players can run... but, for the most part it looks rather bleak.
Some game titles are deprecated for no good reason eg: Halo2 multi-player is canned. How the hell does this make sense? When playing most of these games one player's console becomes the "server" for the others... All you have to do is ALLOW the game to talk to other games and bingo, multi-player. However, we can't do this -- and that makes me mad.
So, 5 friends and I all join up in party chat. We then all pop Halo2 in the 360. We can each see that the others have inserted the game by looking at the Icon next to our names on the friends list. Our XBoxes KNOW that we are all playing the game, and we have connections to each other ALREADY because of the party chat. However, WE CAN'T play online together because the matchmaking server was killed (because of Halo3 & Reach no doubt -- bet they'll eventually get killed to force migration to other new games too).
Now, there is such a thing as unranked matches, so the score keeping server isn't an issue... Additionally there is LAN play. So, we all join my VPN, and play Halo2 -- No XBox Live needed (we use it for party chat and coordinating matches). THANKS FOR NOTHING MICROSOFT! My XBox Live subscription seems to lose value over time... not.. very.. smart.
That's when we all made a pact when in comes to new games: No private/dedicated server? SCREW IT -- DO NOT WANT.
I agree. I tried and tried to login because they offered us a free month as an inconvenience gift (I quit in 2007 for good but had a curiousity how the game had evolved, and it was free). I couldn't login. A friend later told me that the downtime killed the game. His whole guild moved to another MMO because their usual enemy guilds weren't online. The game was a deserted wasteland. The hack was a death knell for sure. I don't know how much of this is true or not, but I am a bit sad since the game helped me recover from a deep depression. My pre-CU jedi and its 3 character slots will go into oblivion.
Where's my sock? There it is...
They're not going to open source something which has a substantial amount of reusable IP.
Except the trading cards aren't a meatspace game. It's a digital trading card game.
Granted, it was designed by Wizards of the Coast, so maybe it might end up making the transition to the real world. However, the way it stands now users will lose access to their cards in December.