Maybe things haven’t completely crashed yet, but 2012 has been another terrible year for the MMO industry.
In the fortnight or so we’ve seen:
- City of Heroes / Villains shut down.
- Trion Worlds let go about 40 staff, or a third of those working on Rift.
- A well argued post that Turbine may be in trouble as a studio.
- Funcom dump subscriptions to The Secret World, making it a buy to play (B2P) title five months after launch.
A lot of MMO titles showed signs of distress in 2012, with new launches failing to keep players engaged and older titles seeing a lot of cut backs, if not servers being completely shut down. I’m going to be doing a longer look back at the year in detail for MMOs, but for those who want the TL;DR summary: IT’S BEEN TERRIBLE.
World Class Villains 