On June 27, the European and North American servers of ArcheAge will shut down, one of the most important Free2Play MMORPGs of the last 10 years. The online role-playing game was released in 2014 alongside The Elder Scrolls Online and WildStar during the last big MMORPG year. In June 2024, it will come to an end.
When is it over? On June 27 at 10 AM, the servers of ArcheAge will close.
You can no longer purchase credits in the shop.
After the servers are shut down, customer support will continue to operate for 3 more months – it will also end on September 27.
ArcheAge talks about The declining number of active players
This is what Kakao Games says:
“After extensively discussing the performance of ArcheAge with XL Games, we have concluded that we are no longer able to offer the MMORPG that we envisioned. The declining number of active players means that the content of the game is no longer as accessible as it once was, and the experience of the game is different from what was originally intended. In light of this, we have made the difficult decision to end the live service of ArcheAge in Europe and North America.”
ArcheAge created hype in 2014
Why was ArcheAge so important? ArcheAge was released in September 2014 in Europe and North America and was one of the first modern sandbox games focusing on house building, economy, PvP, and guilds.
The rush at release was enormous because the game offered many features that domestic MMORPGs did not provide: In a land rush, players competed to secure the best plots of land that offered benefits in the game; later, it was about securing a fortress to dominate a server.
Overwhelmed publisher and technical problems
What went wrong? The game had major issues with hackers, bugs, exploits, and microtransactions. It quickly felt like ArcheAge was not fair.
Even in the beta, ArcheAge stood out with an Energy
system, similar to what is seen in mobile MMORPGs: the possibilities to act in the game were limited unless you spent money to renew your energy or just waited.
After the successful launch, it became apparent that the western partner, Trion Worlds, seemed overwhelmed with ArcheAge. The studio disbanded a few years later. The person responsible for ArcheAge at that time, Marv Lee Kwai, is now working with Amazon on Throne and Liberty.
In recent years, ArcheAge has tried various actions and measures to reconnect with its initial success in 2014 and even launched a new version with ArcheAge Unchained, but ultimately none of the measures were successful.
The game is now closing after nearly 10 years because hardly anyone plays it anymore.
ArcheAge gave us a taste of Asian MMORPGs and their problems
This is ArcheAge from MeinMMO’s perspective: For MeinMMO, ArcheAge was a defining game in 2014: it was alongside The Elder Scrolls Online and WildStar one of the 3 major MMORPGs that launched in the debut year of our site. ArcheAge had many enthusiastic fans back then, who were already familiar with the game from Korea and defended it passionately against criticism, partly because they had invested money in the game and hoped for profits from a dominant position in it.
Ultimately, ArcheAge, despite all its new and exciting features at the time, is an example that exciting ideas may create initial hype, but for long-term success, other qualities are needed, such as polished gameplay, a sense of fairness, and technical competence.
It also highlighted the problem of MMORPGs with a focus on PvP: When it comes to dominating a server and being the best guild there, why continue playing when one guild is clearly dominant?
Ultimately, ArcheAge was a game where servers quickly lost their appeal, and players always waited for a new server to start, where guilds could compete to be dominant again.
Other games from that era, like The Elder Scrolls Online, have evolved over the years and have had peaks again and again. With ArcheAge, they later tried everything to bring back the hype, but they never really succeeded again.
However, it could continue soon:
