Mutable Realms president tells fan sites that subscription-base projections resulted in Wish cancellation
By Michael Lafferty

Cancellation came down to a business decision

The massively multiplayer online game, Wish, closed down Sunday. This was rather abrupt. The plans had been for a huge beta session January, and prior to the notice of the game’s cancellation, the only previous e-mail from the Mutable Realms team was that the number of applications was so large that everyone would be ushered into the beta in stages.

Furthermore, the e-mail stated that no exceptions would be made, so e-mailing and begging to get in would do no good. Here is the text from that e-mail: 

“Because of the enormous number of beta applications that we have received (more than 60,000 at the time of this writing), we will not enable all beta accounts on January 1 at once. Instead, we will only enable a number of randomly chosen beta accounts every day, starting January 1.”

However, something changed very quickly after the optimism of that missive. On Sunday, Jan. 9, the announcement was made that Wish was cancelled, and would go offline at 6 p.m. that night. Not only that, but the forums would be closed as well at the same time. Furthermore, the e-mail letter sent out had more ominous rumblings:

“We wish you the best of luck in the future, and hope that you continue to enjoy online gaming, even with Mutable Realms and Wish not being available anymore.”

Has Mutable Realms closed its doors? That still remains unanswered. While it is not uncommon for MMOs to shut down prior to launch (in 2004, high profile titles like Mythica, Dragon Empires and Ultima X Odyssey were cancelled), this one did have a loyal following and a hardcore fan base – so hardcore, in fact that some members sent letters to Mutable Realms to inquire about the game’s source code, in hopes that they could create, re-create or sustain the Wish title. The people at Project Wish (www.projectwish.com) received a reply from Marc Laukien, president of Mutable Realms, which supplied some of the most information regarding why Wish was cancelled.

The letter/e-mail states: “Wish has been shut down because with the data we gathered during the first 10 days of our Beta 2.0 test, even with our best-case projections for player numbers, we could not have reached enough subscribers for Wish to sustain itself.

“This is the reason that I already gave to several fan site managers, and it is the only reason.

“There have been no technical problems out of the ordinary, we have not been bought out, and neither is there any truth in any of the other rumors that are being spread in the Internet.

“This reason is hard to accept for some fans of Wish, and I can understand that. There has been a very loyal and dedicated community around Wish. But it is simply not large enough to support a group of over 32 full-time game developers, plus many others that worked as consultants.”

It appears, in the end, that it came down to subscription numbers and was purely a business decision. It does cost a lot of money to develop and maintain an MMO, and with the communities being somewhat transitory (stay with one game for several months, then hop to the next big thing), the folks at Mutable Realms may have decided to cut their losses. It is unfortunate, though, that they could not have been more upfront with the reasons in a more general sense. With limited information is what appeared to be a somewhat hasty goodbye note to players, media, and on the home page itself, Mutable Realms opened the door for speculation.

Still, if good comes for this, it has to be that it is wonderful to see gamers, like those at Project Wish who so believe in a game that they are willing to not only fight for its survival, but go so far as to consider how to publish the game on their own. While the notion may be a touch unrealistic without great financial backing, it speaks of the fervor with which gamers view the games they play.

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