I’ve been sitting on the “What Happened” articles for Shadowbane and The Matrix Online for some time now, although I can’t explain why I’ve been waiting to put them out. With the upcoming shutdown of Dungeon Runners and Metaplace, I might as well get caught up on my shutdowns.
The Matrix Online launched back in March 2005, and truly had a lot going for it. An ever changing world, MxO had one of the best story systems in the MMO industry: One that changed by the week. Story progression took the part of new missions every few weeks, while live events were the main staple of immersion; with developers taking the part of the game’s NPCs and acting out live events, including the assassination of Morpheus. Players were brought into the storyline through hints of the following events that would appear over the city, such as certain billboards, or suspicious agents appearing.
If you’ve never heard of the Matrix Online, that wouldn’t be surprising. The game had very little advertising going for it, leading to the low sales that eventually brought the game down to cancellation four years later. The poor reception of the following two Matrix movies did little to ignite enthusiasm for the game, and eventually the number of players leaving outweighed the number of players entering.
Although The Matrix Online shut down after four years of uptime, it did give us an important lesson: We learned that it is possible for an MMO to have an immersive story that changes and evolves over time. We also learned that even Sony Online Entertainment is not immune from shutting down one of their own titles, whereas before the common belief was that they kept their games on life support until they were literally not profitable enough to power their own servers.
The Matrix Online hit the same brick wall many other movie based games hit, and did not succumb due to some massive in-game issue, but because the market was simply too small.
MMO Fallout 