Where MMOGs Go To Die

Today, the Guardian’s games blog features a piece about developers pulling the plug on games. Last month, I had already linked to the press release regarding the end of Asheron’s Call 2; this made me think even more to what happens to MMOGs when they come to an end, and furthermore, to their players.

Nothing lasts forever, and we all know this. Sooner or later we happen to finish a standard PC or console game for the tenth time and don’t feel like playing it anymore, or the console breaks, the current OS become too different to play our old games… These things happen. My boyfriend has a good deal of games he’s had to tinker with heavily only to make them run on XP, since he had bought them ten years ago, when his machine was still running goold ole’ DOS. What about these real-time strategy games you can’t play anymore because you machine’s CPU is way too fast compared to the formerly planned calculation time? I could list many more examples.

MMOGs, in my opinion, are a different problem. It’s not about when you get tired of the game: it’s about when the developers (or other players) pull the plug. Every time I’ve seen my guilds die, it was a heartache. These were people I liked to game with, an ambience I liked to find back when I’d log in, characters I had taken time to level… Then, one day, too many people have lost interest and the guild is disbanded, the players you’ve come to be close to leave the game and you’re left “forced” to find new partners, or, like in the case of Turbine recently, the developers decide to stop the game because it doesn’t generate enough subscribers and revenue anymore. What to do, then, with your high-level characters, with this inability to play when you weren’t tired of the game yet?

There’s no argument that dedicated players of such games have spent time, energy, money and effort in developing characters, communities and online existences which are important to them, financially, emotionally and psychologically. Online friendships, economic benefits, self-efficacy - these are all important aspects of play for MMOG gamers

Where do MMOGs go when they die? Every person who plays such games has a degree of involvment with them, from casual to daily game style. Depending on this degree, a MMOG coming to a halt, or losing its appeal because of external circumstances and not because of our own perception of it, can be a hard thing to deal with. “It’s only a game”, yet we’ve had fun in it, we’ve built links and friendships, some of them having the ability to last way after the game’s end… It’s not just another nothing in one’s life.

Sometimes, I wonder if it’s really worth it, to invest money and time into a game when not knowing how long you’ll be able to have fun with it—but then, as said, nothing lasts forever. Shouldn’t we all be aware of this, and seize the day while it lasts, right?