Complex news, with many facets. A few months ago EA announced that Ultima Online still has 220k subscribers to dissipate some of the rumors about a possible fast death of the game.
Origin, the company behind the game, has been shutted down and many of the developers have left, while other agreed to move to California, at EA’s headquarters.
It’s a fact that UO is slowly dying. Because it’s old? No. Because EA decided to not keep developing it. Marketers know nothing about these games and about their value. UO is a dead product because they decided to not let it evolve and grow.
What happened lately borders the absurd. Origin/EA promised regular publish to improve the game, this exactly when the price of the subscription was being raised. They had to show that the money was going to increase the quality of the game, and so they started to make promises.
Obviously it was only steam and more steam and we all know that the world has a nearly infinite supply of gullible fanboys. The players believed that and kept paying despite the patches were continuously delayed, till the scandal of the last months.
The last patch is a mere pay-service added to the game. A simple patch to allow the transfer of characters between the shards that has been developed for months. Instead of delivering what the users are paying for (and fulfill their promises of the year before), Origin/EA invested their FULL time to work on a pay service.
Now they are putting a new box on the market:
The 7th Anniversary Edition serves one primary purpose, which is to re-estabilish our presence in the retail channels. It’s important for the health of the service that we maintain a box presence so that we always have new players coming in, even in between expansions.
On a personal note, one of the big reasons that I decided to make the move to California was that EA has been supportive of my staffing recommendations and long-term plans for UO. That includes a permanent Live Team, even during expansions.
That’s Anthony Castoro, aka SunSword, the producer of the game. It’s obvious that there have been many battles behind the scenes, it seems that SunSword has been able to obtain some guarantees about the availability of more resources for the game but is this enough? No. An expansion is in the work, now they have a live team working full time and the firsts result are about a PvP overhaul but this doesn’t change anything.
EA has demonstrated that their only interest is exploiting the market and their clients. The money, unfortunately, comes only if you have something valuable to offer.
It’s too late now. It’s time to pay for the idiocy and the greed.