Here at Spilt Milk Studios, we love making games. Why? Because we love to make people smile. It’s the greatest feeling. With Lazarus, we had a chance to reach more people (and hopefully make more smiles) than ever before - it was to be a fast paced MMO that genuinely broke new ground. A huge gameworld to romp around in, filled with thousands of enemies and players, all fighting over cool technology and territory. Never before has such a small team attempted something so grandiose.
And we came close to realising it. Painfully close!
But, sometimes you face challenges that you simply cannot overcome. We spent months and years with a tiny team, exploring the challenges and opportunities of a new design space - persistence, scale, the kinds of things that the cloud can offer - and in the process providing feedback to help our technology partner Improbable improve their tech as well as making Lazarus brilliant fun. and we’re immensely proud of what we achieved. But after a long period of Open Alpha, we’ve made one of the toughest decisions of our careers: we are not going to release Lazarus.
So what does this mean? It means we’re shutting Lazarus down. It has been in Open Alpha for nearly 3 years - which has been incredible, and is longer than some much better known MMO’s - and we’ve made some tremendous new friends along the way. But Lazarus is dead. This was a tough decision, but since this was a pre-Early Access Open Alpha, made available free to our community, we hope you’ll understand our decision, and join us in saying goodbye.
Spilt Milk Studios is fine though - we’re alive and well, and this won’t affect us moving forward. We’ll mourn the passing of this amazing, ambitious game, and we will move forward stronger for the experience.
We’ll leave Lazarus live until Thursday the 12th of September (12/09/2019), at which point the game’s servers will be taken down forever, and a tear will be shed.
We’d love to have a farewell stream with the community before then - we’ll announce details about this on our Discord.
We’ve put a Q&A below here (as well as on our Discord) so please do read them - but feel free to ask us questions over there and we’ll endeavour to answer them as openly as we can.
FAQ
Why is Lazarus being shut down?
Lazarus is a brilliant game and the people who play it with us are amazing, but it did not reach a point during its alpha that would give us the confidence that it would launch successfully. Running a game has many elements - things like server costs and software licenses, the cost of maintaining, running and updating the game as it grows with new features and content, and the licensing of all of the services we use to run things like player accounts and whatnot.
Put simply, if we were to launch Lazarus, the cost of maintaining and expanding the game as we marketed it to more players and worked on our monetisation would put a dangerous financial strain on an independent games studio like ours. We love both Lazarus and the community that has grown around it, but we can’t take that risk.
When is Lazarus being shut down?
12/09/2019 at 12:00GMT (midday). The game will run as normal until that date, but we won’t be releasing any further updates or making fixes.
What about your other games?
We’ve got a bunch of other projects to work on, and we enjoy talking about them as openly as we are able to. We even have some secret ones! Why not come over and chat to us about them on our Discord.
I have a question not covered here.
Hit us up on Discord.