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Nicholas Lovell
Home   >   Sandbox   >   Matrix Online to shut down

Matrix Online to shut down

By on June 1, 2009
Matrix Online logo

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.

About Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.com