2022 has been a solid year for gamers seeing the release of many highly anticipated games. From Sony's big hit exclusives like Horizon Forbidden West and God of War: Ragnarok to Nintendo's excellent first-party releases like Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and Bayonetta 3, single-player games have been all the hype lately, and for good reason. But where narrative-driven RPGs and colorful indies have found success this year, many MMOs have had to bite the dust.
An MMO, as the name suggests, is a massively multiplayer online game that is usually very expensive to develop and maintain. These games lie heavily on micro-transactions and a solid online player base. Thus, when the player count drops below a certain number, MMOs end up being shut down completely. This year was no different, as many MMOs bid their farewell to players due to one reason or another. Here are some notable MMOs that shut down this year.
5 Forsaken World
Developed by Perfect World Beijing and published by Perfect World Entertainment, Forsaken World was a free-to-play MMORPG that was released back in 2011. The game featured the usual class and race systems and let the players dive into a fantastical world where their actions shaped the world around them. It was one of the few MMORPGs to offer a playable Vampire class.
An official statement was made by the developers of the game on April 28th, 2022, that Forsaken World servers will be shutting down on November 30th, 2022, ending its 11-year-long run. In 2021, Perfect World Entertainment was bought by Embracer Group for $103 million and changed its name to Gearbox Publishing. The new officials wanted to focus more on the Western market, thus ending the life of this Chinese-centered MMO.
4 Eternal Magic
Eternal Magic was a relatively new MMO RPG released in 2020 and was developed by Duoyi Network and Published by 101X. The game showed a lot of promise with its gigantic world and dynamic combat which featured massive battles with up to 80 players at a time, but it failed to really take off. The player count for the game had significantly dropped from reaching an all-time high of 620 players back in 2019 to a mere 6 players at the beginning of January this year.
Eternal Magic had also received backlash for holding an in-game female beauty contest and was criticized for plagiarizing elements from other popular MMOs. While no official reason was provided, the developers announced that Eternal Magic would be shutting down on January 10th, 2022, and so it did.
3 Kiriritca REBOOT
Developed and Published by ALLM Co., Kiritica REBOOT was a fairly recent MMO that launched in 2017 as a revised version of the original Kiritika Online MMO. But it failed to resonate with players and quickly lost its player base. The game offered various classes, hordes of enemies, and giant bosses on top of its anime-inspired visuals. However, it lost its charm to more popular MMOs over time.
The developers made an official statement stating that Kiritika REBOOT will be shutting down on February 16th, 2022, but only a few months later another version of the game, titled Kiritika Global was launched in June of 2022. This new version of the game was marketed as a play-to-earn experience, essentially making it a blockchain game that will make use of NFTs and cryptocurrency for in-game purchases.
2 Elyon
Formerly known as Ascent: Infinite Realm, Elyon was an MMORPG developed by Bluehole studios and published by Kakao Games. The game was released in Korea in December 2020 and was made free-to-play before it launched. Elyon saw its western release in the regions of North America and Europe in October of 2021. The game featured dynamic clashes between two realms called the Vulpin and the Ontari.
Unfortunately, a low player retention rate along with the game's decreasing popularity had forced developers to shut down the game on December 7th, 2022, hardly a year after its release. Elyon reached an all-time high player count of 15400 at one point but in its last month only had about 14 active players.
1 TERA Online
TERA Online is an MMORPG developed by Bluepoint Studios and KRAFTON. TERA, short for The Exiled Realm of Arborea, featured typical MMORPG elements including a fantasy world, deep lore, questing, crafting, and real-time PVP combat. The game was released in South Korea in January 2011, following a 2012 release in North America and Europe.TERA Online may not have been the most popular MMORPG, but the game had 1.4 million registered players by 2013 and garnered over 25 million player accounts by 2017.
The original publishers of the game, En Masse Entertainment, had already shut down in 2020, and since then the game was being handled by publisher Gameforge, who announced early this year that servers for TERA Online will effectively shut down on June 30th, 2022. Gameforge stated they can no longer provide quality content for the game and so have decided to take it down.