Hey all,
Sorry for the silent treatment, we’ve kept the server up in maintenance mode while considering how to move forward with the game but honestly no real epiphany ever came. So now we’ve sadly come to the conclusion that due to lack of resources to support the game, we’re stopping sales and finally shutting down the server indefinitely starting from June 1st.
I’ll give a more detailed explanation below, but the short story is that MMOs really aren’t the easiest or cheapest games to develop, which wasn’t on our minds when we started GSO as a hobby project back in 2014.
Our core team is still alive and well; we’re working on a new project that you may want to check out. I’ll go more into that further below as well.
What went down with GSO?
While our very small team was okay for developing new content, as things progressed, it was becoming more and more clear that big back-end reworks needed to be done. These were issues that plagued the game’s performance and stability – lag, server crashes and rollbacks were frequent. The problem wasn’t identifying what needed to be done, but the sheer monumental task of it all required much more skilled manpower on the team and presumably something to pay those extra hands with.
Focusing on getting more players in – thus more revenue – wouldn’t work, because the game couldn’t support large populations at all. Alternatively we could’ve just cracked on with slowly fixing the game’s core technical issues with no new content or efforts to attract new players being made, but that didn’t seem like a real option either. We’d still probably be just “fixing” the game. We kept the lights on for now while figuring out our options, but the reality is that this game was probably never going to take flight without significant financial investment.
Future plans
We never know what the future brings but for now there are no realistic plans to reboot GSO.
We’re instead focusing on our new project. It’s making use of a lot of the same ideas and inspirations as GSO and its scope reflects our team size and resources a little better. It’s a medieval-fantasy single player RPG called The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker and if you liked playing GSO with us, then we think you’ll like this one too. Here’s a link to learn more:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1189290/The_Black_Grimoire_Cursebreaker/
We’re working on putting an open playtest out shortly, so if you’re still interested in following us and the work we do, checking out this game is the best way of doing so.
It's sad that GSO didn't work out, but we learned a lot in making it that we can carry onto future games. Despite its problems, we’re still proud of what we managed to achieve and really grateful for all of you who played the game passionately, stuck with us and supported us along the way.
We hope to still see you around, thanks for playing!
