Crowfall was officially announced in early 2015. At that time, well-known developers like Raph Koster and J. Todd Coleman announced that they wanted to create a completely new type of MMORPG. Finally, in July 2021, the release took place. However, a new letter to investors indicates that the servers may soon be shut down.
What does the letter say? The letter to investors paints a rather grim picture of Crowfall:
- The game’s numbers are said to have fallen short of expectations.
- There have already been layoffs and the active development team for Crowfall has been further reduced. J. Todd Coleman, for example, is already working on a new game codenamed “Atlas”.
- The company initially aimed to lose only 1 million dollars per quarter. Currently, it’s about 770,000 dollars per month.
- In the 3rd quarter of 2020, the company reported a loss of 2.4 million dollars. In the 3rd quarter of 2021 – just one quarter after release – it’s still a loss of 2.4 million dollars. Although there were revenues of almost 1 million dollars, expenses have risen correspondingly.
The outlook for the future is also not positive. It says in a statement:
If we do not notice a significant difference in performance by the end of November, we must decide whether:
A: We will continue to invest in features and content for Crowfall
B: We reduce investments in Crowfall and let it continue in maintenance mode
C: We shut it down and prioritize our second project (Codename: Atlas).
Furthermore, it states that shutting down Crowfall would reduce costs and prevent burnout until July/August 2021.
What is the performance of Crowfall currently? Recently, the developers have been trying to create more attention with free trial accounts, discounts, and Twitch drops. At least from the outside, there has been no noticeable improvement in Crowfall’s performance. The game remains scarcely present in the public eye, and the servers were very empty today, on December 6, as usual.
This suggests that ArtCraft will have to choose one of the three options in the coming days or weeks. However, options B and C are unlikely to please Crowfall players who have waited years for the release.
What kind of letter is this anyway? Crowfall is developed by the indie studio ArtCraft Entertainment. They have various investors who are informed about the status of the company every quarter.
One of these letters has now come to the public, but has since been deleted from the forum and reddit. Excerpts from it have been shown by YouTuber KiraTV on his channel:
Crowfall wanted to be innovative and redefine the genre
Why does the impending end hurt so much? In 2015, Crowfall was announced as a game that aimed to revolutionize the MMORPG genre. It wanted to reconnect theme park and sandbox, incorporate strategy elements, and create different scenarios that would play out like a season of Game of Thrones.
Several worlds were planned where players could “win” the MMORPG. The gains were then to be brought into a permanent social world: the Eternal Kingdoms. A broad class system was also announced, with 11 classes and a total of 33 subclasses.
However, it quickly became clear that Crowfall would cater more to a niche of old-school and PvP fans. But even they could not be convinced.
Where are the problems? At the release, Crowfall had several issues, including poor optimization and performance, an unconventional interface, a rather weak tutorial, and a boring crafting system.
Additionally, Crowfall is strongly aimed at a PvP community. It thrives on PvP, castle fights, and planned large-scale battles. However, it needs a solid community for that. And exactly that was missing at launch.
This is also due to the fact that the players who financially supported Crowfall had largely dropped out during alpha and beta. This, in turn, was also due to performance issues but also constant changes in the game systems. Furthermore, the game was in a testing stage for so long that many players eventually got tired of playing the same game from the beginning again. Because with each release, there was a wipe of previous progress.
What do you think about Crowfall? Have you tried the MMORPG or did you avoid it altogether? Did you think there would be such problems so soon after the release?
