New MMORPG celebrated its release in 2021 after 7 years of development – but it is already threatened
Crowfall was officially announced in early 2015. Back then, well-known developers like Raph Koster and J. Todd Coleman announced that they wanted to create a whole new kind of MMORPG. The release finally took place in July 2021. But a new letter to investors suggests that the servers could be shut down soon.
What is in the letter? The letter to investors paints a rather bleak picture of Crowfall:
- The numbers of the game are said to have remained below expectations.
- There have already been layoffs and the active Crowfall development team has been further downsized. J. Todd Coleman, for example, is already working on a new game code-named “Atlas”.
- The company had initially set itself the goal of only making $ 1 million in losses per quarter. Currently, however, it is about $ 770,000 per month.
- In the third quarter of 2020, the company made a loss of 2.4 million dollars. In the 3rd quarter of 2021 – and thus a quarter after the release – it is still $ 2.4 million minus. While there was just under $ 1 million in revenue, spending grew at the same rate.
The outlook for the future does not look positive either. There it says in a statement:
If we don’t notice a significant difference in performance by the end of November, we have to decide whether:
A: We continue to invest in Crowfall features and content
B: We’re going to reduce the investment in Crowfall and keep it running in maintenance mode
C: Shut it down and prioritize our second project (code name: Atlas).
It goes on to say that shutting down Crowfall would reduce costs and prevent burnout by July / August 2021.
How is Crowfall performing right now? Most recently, the developers tried to attract more attention with free test accounts, discounts and Twitch drops. At least from the outside, there was no noticeable performance improvement from Crowfall. The game is still barely present in public and the servers were very empty today, December 6th, as usual.
This suggests that ArtCraft will have to pull one of the three options in the coming days or weeks. The options B and C are unlikely to please the Crowfall players, some of whom have waited years for the release.
What kind of letter is that anyway? Crowfall is developed by the indie studio ArtCraft Entertainment. They in turn have various investors who are informed about the company’s status every quarter.
One of these letters has now been made public, but has since been deleted from the forum and reddit. The YouTuber KiraTV has shown excerpts on his channel:
Crowfall wanted to be innovative and settle with the genre
Why does the impending end hurt so much? In 2015, Crowfall was heralded as a game that aims to turn the MMORPG genre inside out. It wanted to reconnect the theme park and sandbox, incorporate strategy elements and create different scenarios that should play like a season of Game of Thrones.
Several worlds were planned in which players could “win” the MMORPG. The profits should then be brought into a permanent social world: the Eternal Kingdoms. In addition, a broad class system was announced, with 11 classes and a total of 33 sub-classes.
It quickly became clear, however, that Crowfall would rather target a niche of old school and PvP fans. But even they could not be convinced.
What are the problems? At the release, Crowfall had a few problems, including poor optimization and performance, an interface that took getting used to, a rather weak tutorial and a boring crafting system.
In addition, Crowfall is strongly aimed at a PvP community. It thrives on PvP, battles for castles and planned mass battles. However, this requires a solid community. And this was exactly what was missing at the start.
This is also due to the fact that the players who supported Crowfall with money largely dropped out of the alpha and beta. This in turn was also due to performance problems, but also constant changes in the game systems. In addition, the game was in a test stage for so long that at some point many players got tired of playing the same game all over again. Because for every release there was a wipe of the progress made so far.
What do you think of Crowfall? Have you already tried the MMORPG or have you left your hands off it? Would you have thought that there would be such problems so soon after the release?
Reference-mein-mmo.de