Sparkplay Media – MMO Fallout

Earth (Hopefully) Eternal Coming Back Soon…

Earth Eternal has been making the newsstands recently due to the game’s almost-closure, auctioning, and selling off to an unnamed company. To the dismay of many of us, on August 31st Earth Eternal shut down with absolutely no explanation or forewarning, bringing both the website and game offline, along with a long silence from the company’s Twitter and Facebook pages.

Well, yesterday the Earth Eternal twitter sparked up:

The EE servers are closed until further notice. All your characters are saved and the new owners will be bringing the game back soon(ish).

On September 9th, the following was posted on Earth Eternal’s Facebook page:

Hi everyone. As you know, Earth Eternal is down. Our ISP pulled the plug for non-payment, which was expected. I wasn’t able to give you any warning, unfortunately, because I was at Burning Man and completely out of reach for the week that it went down. Full backups of all the data exist and the company that is in the process of buying Earth Eternal will be starting it back up again in the nearish future.

Hopefully more to come in the next week or so. Still no word on Earth Eternal’s buyer.

All Is Not Bad: Earth Eternal Has Been Sold!

I can’t shake the feeling that we’ve been in rather a slump this year. We’ve seen the closure of Dungeon Runners, Metaplace, Cities XL, Phantasy Star, and now Chronicles of Spellborn, Exteel, and possibly All Points Bulletin in the near future. So, owing to that knowledge, we take what good news we can, and more specifically that good news is that Earth Eternal has been sold!

In a posting today on the Earth Eternal website, Sparkplay CEO Matt Mihaly (one of the two remaining staff members) announced that the bidding has ended, and the game has been sold to an unnamed buyer. The buyer cannot be named currently, as the contracts haven’t been signed and all of the formalities are not finished, but Mihaly has promised that it is a known company with the pre-existing audience to give the game its due attention. As he put it:

“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.”

We’ll have the company name in about a week, but until then let’s throw MMO Fallout’s rule on speculation out the window and try and guess who it is. My bet is on Jagex, who seems to have a growing interest in funding fledgling MMOs. Whoever it is, it’s a big company according to the news report (“moved astonishingly quickly for a company of their size.”).

Great! Now all we need is for Realtime Worlds to announce that they’ve secured an investor and the week might not seem so bleak.

Earth Eternal Likely To Shut Down

Earth Eternal is one of those MMOs I talked about mainly on my Facebook page, which mostly occurred last year when I was in the beta. The MMO has always been tiny, be it the furry inhabitants that populate the world, or the teeny developer that created it, but not the client that ran it. Earth Eternal is like WoW-Lite, I believe I referred to it as, but injected with a full syringe of vitamin-D (The D stands for D’aww).

So, of course, I’m saddened to say Earth Eternal will likely be shutting down fairly soon. In an open letter to the community, Sparkplay CEO Matt Mihaly announced that the team has been cut down to two people, one of them being him, and the latest attempt to sell the game has failed. Although Earth Eternal is up for auction, it is probable that no one will buy up the title.

“I will keep you updated as to what is going to happen with Earth Eternal, but in all likelihood we won’t know until late on Friday whether someone is going to buy EE and keep it running or not. Let’s hope for the best!”

Here’s hoping for the best.