Sparkplay – MMO Fallout

APB Closed Beta Incoming, Still No Earth Eternal

: Adorable.

All Points Bulletin and Earth Eternal shut down around the same time last year, give or take about a month, and since then only one of the two has been getting much of any news coverage, and that tile is not Earth Eternal.

Over on the APB front, K2 Networks has been putting out regular blog updates on how the company is planning on dealing with free players, cheaters, private servers, and more. The latest blog post details hopes for a late-February launch of the APB closed beta, although any difficulties may extend that date into March. Closed beta details will be listed next week, but those of you tech-inclined folk may find some interest in the rest of the blog, detailing what K2 is currently doing to get the game back up and running.

Meanwhile, we’ve heard nothing new out of Earth Eternal. Neither the game’s Facebook or Twitter have been updated since around September, although off-site reports indicate that the game has been sold to Time Warner and will be rebooted sometime early this year. I am somewhat disappointed to see the lack of news out of Earth Eternal, especially since the buyer has never officially come out and announced themselves.

With All Points Bulletin, Earth Eternal, and hopefully Hellgate: London being brought back this year, who knows? Perhaps 2011 will be the year of MMO necromancy!

Earth Eternal Buyer Likely Time Warner

“I’m pretty happy this company won the bidding, as I think they have the resources and the pre-existing audience to help make EE a success.”

One of our last messages from Sparkplay CEO Matt Mihaly before the Earth Eternal servers and website shut down in what feels like a year ago. Speculation has been high since Earth Eternal shut its doors and announced that, although they did find a buyer at auction, the buyer could not be named and there was absolutely no inkling to when the game would be coming back.

The Earth Eternal fans have been diligent, admittedly more diligent than myself, in sleuthing and unearthing just who purchased Earth Eternal, and the answer is? Time Warner, which most of you figured out from the title. Of course, this isn’t a concrete announcement, but Earth Eternal’s silent Facebook page has a fourth administrator, Jac Ky. Jac Ky’s profile lists his likes as Cartoon Network India, Cartoon Network Australia, and his few wall posts include the Ben10 Omniverse game.

Again, this isn’t concrete, but it does coincide with the fact that Earth Eternal was recently moved to a new host, on the same servers as Cartoon Network’s website. Undoubtedly Time Warner has some deep pockets, and if the speculation is true may be putting some major upgrades into Earth Eternal to get it ready for relaunch.

Of course, we may see Duke Nukem Forever before we see Earth Eternal relaunch, so whoever purchased it is moot at this point. Big thanks to Rhinok over in the MMORPG.com forums for finding this information.

Earth Not-So-Eternal: 1 Week Later

I’ve been sitting on this for a week now, so I think it’s as good of a time as any to start talking. Back in August I wrote about Earth Eternal facing potential shut down due to Sparkplay Media running out of cash. In the ensuing week, the company put the game up for auction, where the title was sold to another, then unnamed company. Things were looking up.

On August 31st, the Earth Eternal website and game shut down with no explanation whatsoever. After a week of patiently waiting, any attempt to log into the Earth Eternal website or game is met with a “cannot find eartheternal.com” and the game servers are providing no response.

I want to be optimistic on this, so I’m going to bring back what Sparkplay CEO Matt Mihaly said about EE riding on the servers until the host shuts them down for nonpayment. Vaulting off of that optimism, I’m still crossing my fingers for who the purchaser may turn out to be. My top choices are Jagex, Quest Online, or Acclaim (maybe not the last one). We’ll all know that we’ve woken up in hell if the purchaser is NCsoft.

More on Earth Eternal as it appears, and speaking of investing, when is All Points Bulletin getting saved?