The virtual reality MMORPG Zenith: The Last City launched into Early Access on Steam, Oculus Quest, and PlayStation VR on January 27, 2022. VR fans had long dreamed of the future of gaming, as seen in Sword Art Online and Ready Player One. Two and a half years later, it is over. The developers are giving up and explaining their work in a 7-minute video.
What kind of game is this?
- Zenith is a VR MMORPG. It takes place in a futuristic world with monsters.
- Many players described it as “the first real MMORPG” for VR headsets.
- However, the sentiment towards the game has always been: “The game is not finished – it has released incomplete in Early Access. It lacks too many features.”
Strong start and huge financial injection fueled the VR dream in 2022
Zenith started off strong: At launch on January 27, 2022, Zenith sparked the interest of about 4,000 players on Steam, who crashed the servers. There was also a large Discord server with over 125,000 members.
The developers say today in a video: The success surprised them completely. At release, Zenith suddenly became the best-selling game on Steam and in the Oculus store.
The future looked bright: In May 2022, we reported on MeinMMO that the developers received a financial injection of 31.7 million euros to further develop Zenith.
This is how it went after the release: However, the player numbers on Steam present a disastrous picture: After the release, player numbers dropped sharply and have never fully recovered in the past two years.
While there were significant spikes in player numbers in June 2022, May 2023, and October 2023, these were just brief surges before the numbers dwindled again in the following month.
There are no player numbers for other platforms besides Steam, but based on experience, it is likely similar there.
Zenith simply could never retain players
This is now the news: Season 4, which starts in August, will be the last season for Zenith. After that, the game will no longer be further developed. This was announced by the developers in a 7-minute video.
The revenues were simply not enough to continue developing the game. However, the servers are expected to remain online for the foreseeable future.
This is what the developers say: In the video, the two developers explain their story: They were surprised that their “impossible project” even made it to launch and garnered so much interest. There have been many great stories surrounding the game. But ultimately, players simply did not stay, but left Zenith again.
They tried “extremely hard” to improve the game based on player feedback. They also promoted the game through influencers and Facebook, but ultimately it was always the same story:
“We saw a strong increase with an update, but within a month, most players were gone again.”
From 2023, the game no longer financed itself; instead, the developers spent more money on development than what was earned. Ultimately, they could not reach their goal.
After Season 4, they will no longer update Zenith but will turn to new projects.
This is what’s behind it: Apparently, they struck gold with the idea of a VR MMORPG and managed to raise fans’ hopes and convince investors that Zenith is a lucrative business idea and offers a future.
Ultimately, such “dreamer stories” are extremely difficult to combine with the genre “MMORPG”. Solo developers or small teams can indeed achieve massive success in gaming, but usually with strategy games or simulations.
The developers of Zenith have come a long way, but certainly not as far as the fans of the game had hoped. They are currently feeling the disappointment of players in the reviews on Steam. There, the “Recent Reviews” have dropped to Very Negative, with people accusing the developers of “abandoning” the game after making wrong decisions.
Successful MMORPGs seem to require such immense manpower and expertise to continually produce content that it is not compatible with “small teams” and “crowdfunding”: 6 promising crowdfunding MMORPGs that have failed spectacularly
