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Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about how
Vanguard's early stumbles foreshadowed the changing MMORPG industry. In January 2007, when
Vanguard lurched its way to launch, the genre was barely a decade old; it was booming, and it had never suffered hardship on a massive scale. In the west, we'd seen only three "major" MMOs sunset (
Motor City Online,
Earth and Beyond, and
Asheron's Call 2), and only one MMO,
Anarchy Online, had "gone F2P," though we hadn't yet thought to call it yet because it was such a rare and new thing. In fact, it wasn't until 2008's first big wave of AAA, post-
World of Warcraft MMOs launched and mostly flopped that MMORPG players gave much thought to the future of the genre and how
WoW had reshaped (and possibly broken) it. Maybe not even then.
Here in 2015, sunsets are commonplace, and the vast majority of modern MMOs have adopted some sort of subscriptionless model. Last year, we lost more than a dozen MMOs, including
Vanguard itself, all of them wiped from the face of the earth (
at least until someone decides to resurrect them), and several more under development were canceled, leading to concern among industry watchers like those of us who pen for Massively. Let's try to get some perspective and revisit the MMOs we lost in 2014.
