On September 1st, 2007 NCSoft will officially close the Auto Assault servers. The news hit the community hard today as this post-apocalyptic car MMO meets an end shared by games like Earth and Beyond. It's rare for an MMO to shut down, but unfortunately for fans of the game, NCSoft just didn't see it as good business sense.
"After a while it gets to the point where the return we're getting on what we're putting into it is just not matching up," NCSoft Director of Public Relations David Swofford told WarCry after the news hit. "We just didn't have that many people in the service."
According to Swofford, NCSoft owns the Auto Assault intellectual property. If that does not change before September 1st, there is no legal way that the game can continue on. However, hope may not be gone. A few years ago, NetDevil opted to run their niche space MMO Jumpgate themselves after it found only a moderate audience.
Swofford told us that no one at NCSoft will lose their jobs as a result of this move. He was unable to comment on what chances the game might have of being sold back to NetDevil and would only say that at this time they plan to close the game on September 1st and that is all.
NetDevil could not be reached for comment at the time of publish.
"The majority of people who play MMOs have never raided," Perpetual President and Co-Founder Chris McKibbin explained. The sometimes absurd time commitment of raids is why. In World of Warcraft, players need to spend hours organizing dozens of real people. For anyone outside the hardcore, that means high-end raids are a wealth of content that they simply cannot hope to experience. Gods and Heroes turns that dynamic on its ear with its minion system, where a single player can represent six characters on the screen. The result is that a simple five man group can experience raid content in Gods and Heroes, a development that severely cuts into the organizational time required for that kind of epic content.
