The action MMO Guardians of Ember experienced a revival just under a year ago. Now the plug is being pulled again. What’s going on?
This is the story behind Guardians of Ember: The action MMO was released in September 2017. But shortly thereafter, a scandal involving the gaming platform Steam occurred.
Because the then publisher InselGames instructed its employees to write reviews for the publisher’s games. This was considered “review manipulation.” As a result, all games from this publisher were removed from Steam. That was in February 2018.
Now InselGames wanted to keep the game alive outside of Steam, but player numbers dropped rapidly. At times, only 100-200 people were playing the MMO simultaneously.
Then the publisher Gameforge picked up the game in September 2018 and wanted to revive it. In March 2019, they launched a soft launch in North America and Europe. But that did not last long.
What’s new now? It seems that unfortunately, the second demise of the MMO is imminent. Tweets from the official Twitter account and emails to players indicate that the premature end of Guardians of Ember is set for next month, in February 2020 – just under a year after Gameforge’s soft launch.
The team writes there that the contract between Gameforge and Runewalker, the game’s developers, will not be continued. On February 14, 2020, they would terminate the usage contracts with the players.
Since there are no other servers for Guardians of Ember, there will also be no character transfers. The payment service has been suspended, currency can still be issued until the shutdown of the MMO.
What do players say about it? There are hardly any reactions on Twitter about the impending second exit. Reddit however shows more opinions on the matter.
Player “GreatName” writes: “It’s sad when the shutdown of the game is the first thing I hear about an MMO.”
- “I bought the game at launch, but the performance issues made it unplayable for me. I tried again a few months later and it was even worse,” writes sephsta
- ” […] I enjoyed the game for a while, but I believe it didn’t really become popular due to performance issues. On my reasonably decent laptop, it was barely playable even on low settings […],” writes phoenixrisinguptoday
Others ridicule it and write that it would probably be sad news for the two people still playing it.
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