Proving how difficult it is to maintain an MMO, Sony Online Entertainment has announced that it is to close down Matrix Online at the end of July 2009.
Clearly, the Matrix is no longer as powerful a licence as it once was, and Sony has more mass-market fish to fry with recently-launched Free Realms.
Equally, with rapid failures of titles such as Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa, Matrix Online’s four-year run is not a bad achievement.
But I wonder if these failures are driving home to publishers and investors the message that investing in traditional MMOs is risky, difficult and very rarely profitable.
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