Nearly two years after its release, the sandbox MMORPG Tree of Life is being retired. They prefer to focus on other projects.
This is why the development of Tree of Life is being halted: In an announcement, the developer of Tree of Life, Young-chae Kim, announced the end of development. Thus, Tree of Life will not fully close 2 years after its release in August 2017.
The reason Kim states is that there is a lack of experience to properly continue developing the game. It is no longer possible to improve it:
I sincerely apologize that I could not make Tree of Life a better game due to inexperience. Tree of Life was a project I dreamed of my whole life and I feel overwhelming regret.
In recent months, I have repeatedly wondered how I can provide you with a better world. I concluded that it would be better to create a new service with the knowledge I have gained over the last 4 years than to maintain Tree of Life.
To this end, Kim posted a farewell video that feels like the credits of a sad movie:
What does this end mean? Tree of Life will now be permanently switched to “maintenance mode”. This means the game will not receive any more updates. The servers will continue to run, allowing players to still play.
This step does have some impacts:
- The user service will be discontinued after 3 months
- Users who bought the game in the month prior to the announcement will receive a refund
- Sales, including in-game purchases, will still be possible, but everything will be significantly cheaper, just to cover the server costs
- Experience points and the drop chance of items is increased
This is what happens next: For the future, Kim plans to shift focus to new projects. The team wants to allocate its resources to that instead. What new content will come from the studio OddOne Games remains to be seen.
Such an end has also happened to games that had significantly larger budgets than this indie project:
