MMORPG wanted to be “the new Ultima Online”, fails on Steam – is bought by NFT company

The Kickstarter MMORPG Legends of Aria could face a dire fate or it could lead the way in a new wave of “meta-metaverse” games powered by NFT. Who knows? The likeable little MMORPG once started to be a successor in the spirit of Ultima Online, came on Steam in July 2020, but was never particularly successful. Now the game has been bought by a company that wants to earn their money with the controversial technology “NFT”.

What kind of MMORPG was that?

• We have been reporting on MeinMMO since 2015 about the development of “Legends of Aria”: a sandbox MMORPG that wanted to go in the direction of “Ultima Online”. Originally it fetched $ 100,000 as a Kickstarter project “Shards Online”.
• The game had some charming old-school ideas for MMORPG purists and wanted to emphasize the freedom of the player in the sandbox, but the game suffered from “chronically too little attention” from the start.
• From 2019 onwards, our reports on MeinMMO were mainly about how bad things were for the MMORPG on Steam, how desperately it was still looking for a turnaround. MeinMMO author Alexander Leitsch predicted the death of the MMORPG in 2020 and 2021. As Massivelyop reports: There has been no significant new update for a long time.

How many players does it still have on Steam? Currently there are around 20 simultaneous players that you can find in Legends of Aria on Stream.

At the “peak” in August 2019, it was 560 – but the number slipped massively. These are not numbers that an MMORPG can use to stay afloat.

MMOPRG is to become part of the meta-metaverse

This is the news now: The studio “Blue Money Games” has bought Legends of Aria completely, together with the engine:

• It is said that the “Shards Engine” is optimized for MMORPGs and can support thousands of players in a virtual world.
• The “AAA” game is now being expanded to include blockchain and Web3 mechanics, and thereby “metaversified” with NFT and a token-based in-game currency
• Legends of Aria is to become part of the “meta-metaverse” of Realms of Ethernity
• In addition, the founder and boss of the studio behind Legend sof Aria, Derek Brinkman, will become the new technology boss at the company that buys the MMORPG. Brinkman founded Citadel Studios in 2013 after previously working as a technician at EA and Mythic. At EA he was actually responsible for Ultima Online.

Buyer says: He wants to eat up more games!

What does the buyer say? There is a rather weird-looking quote from the founder of Blue Monster Games (via cointelegraph). That being said:

“Realms of Ethernity is not a normal metaverse game. It will be the metaverse eating up the gaming world. Our purchase of Citadel Studios is only the first step in that vision. We’re going to bring Metaverse elements into existing games which will then become part of the Realm of Ethernity Metaverse in their entirety. Expect to see many more of these purchases from us over the next several months! “

Joseph Rubin, Cou-Founder Blue Monster Games

This is behind it: MMORPG purists are likely to get screaming attacks and pull their hair out at the news. Because in their ears the message sounds like: “We are now turning your Ultima Online successor into a thoroughly commercialized game with lots of cool buzzwords.”

Well, Legends of Aria had failed as an MMORPG anyway, now it may have a second life as an NFT-based, microtransacted game within a meta-metaverse, whatever that is supposed to be.

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