The new MMO Magic: Legends launched with a lot of hype and the best ingredients for an MMO hit, but it couldn’t establish itself. Even worse: The action MMO quickly fell into oblivion. Our author Schuhmann explains why.
Here is the development story of Magic Legends: The fresh game “Magic: Legends” was mentioned for the first time in 2017, then still as a “new MMORPG that would take place in the huge universe of Magic: The Gathering”.
Cryptic Studios officially presented the game at the end of 2019. It was still said: Magic: Legends will be a “real new MMORPG”. The anticipation for a new Western online RPG from a renowned studio set in a large, established fantasy world was high back then.
But shortly afterward, it became clear: The development of Magic: Legends had taken a turn towards action MMORPG. What was now shown resembled a “Mobile Game” or a “Diablo”-like more than a classic MMORPG. The developers said: The classic MMORPG perspective does not suit Magic, otherwise, you would constantly be staring at a summoned ice monster’s behind.
In March 2021, a beta for Magic started that hardly interested anyone. Worse still: Those few who checked it out attributed some “potential” to the game, but also pointed out an emerging “Pay2Win” problem.
Only a few months later, in June 2021, the developers announced: The project will be discontinued.
The special thing is: Between the start of the beta and the end of the game, most players seemed to have already forgotten that “Magic: Legends” even existed. The game generated no traction and no attachment. It could not establish itself in the minds of MMO players.
How poorly interest in Magic: Legends developed can be seen in the “Google Trends” barometer: The game was only interesting worldwide for a tiny moment: When the beta was announced in March 2021. But the global search interest fell back to “almost dead” within 3 weeks.
Magic: Legends could not maintain the brief flare-up of interest: Just 3 weeks after the presentation of the beta, it was as if 95% of people had forgotten that the game even existed.
Only when the game is dead and buried do people start searching for it again.
New MMO Magic: Legends fails despite 3 strong starting conditions
These good ingredients for an MMO hit the game had: The game actually had the most important ingredients for a hit:
- An experienced studio – Cryptic Studios have already proven with Neverwinter and Star Trek Online that they can develop “big licenses” into successful MMOs over the years
- A perfect license – “Magic: The Gathering” is one of the most popular game worlds in fantasy. The “baseline interest” in such a brand is high
- A strong publisher – Perfect World is firmly established in online gaming and successful internationally
The key art as an “anchor point” for MMO players
What was missing from the game? In the discussions after the end of Magic: Legends, it became clear that many either had never heard of the game or that they had already forgotten that Magic Legends exists.
Sure, one can now argue that the game lacked clear “What makes me unique” elements, that there are countless games in the “ISO-Diablo” look and that the game apparently reminded too much of “Mobile Games”, but the problems with Magic: Legends start even earlier.
The game lacked a clear key art: An image that immediately anchored itself in the players’ minds and made it clear: “This is the game with that one thing.”
When you look at the successful MMOs and also the unsuccessful MMOs of recent years that at least were talked about, it becomes clear that these games have typical “images” and an aesthetic that you immediately associate with the respective game. Even if these images can vary from player to player.
My images for the individual games are as follows:
- In Destiny 2, it’s the look of the Guardians and the Traveler
- In WoW, it’s the Orcs with their massive shoulder armor
- In WildStar, the image of the Chua has become established
- In Guild Wars 2, I always think of the animalists, the Charr
Even a rather unsuccessful game like Anthem sticks in players’ memories: Hardly anyone can forget the flying suits from Anthem, which already promise a varied gameplay full of action, aerial chases, and pure violence with their different shapes.
When you see the key art from Anthem, you immediately feel like going into one of the suits and take off:
In Magic: Legends, such a clear image is missing. Here, Cryptic Studios could never establish a clear “key art” that stuck in the minds of players.
When we searched for images on MeinMMO to present Magic: Legends, we repeatedly found the image of a woman looking determined and casting a spell: An impactful image, surely, but this image could also represent countless other MMOs. No one really associates it with Magic: Legends.
It is interchangeable and lacks an “anchor effect”.
The absence of such an anchor led to the fact that just 3 weeks after the beta started, very few remembered that the game even existed. Thus, no hype was created, and Cryptic Studios quickly abandoned the project.
Without key art, without an anchor, games quickly fade from memory.
A similar problem plagued the shooter “Battleborn” years ago: The shooter had numerous weird and quirky heroes but could never find that “one key art” that anchored itself with players. Therefore, players constantly confused Battleborn with Overwatch or Lawbreakers back then. That was a sure sign of impending doom.
And indeed, Battleborn was also a game that, despite outstanding ingredients, was discontinued far too early. Perhaps several MMOs with great potential have fallen by the wayside because they failed to find that one image that burned itself into the players’ minds.
Again and again, MMOs die early. But for them to be discontinued like Magic: Legends while still in beta is quite rare:
