Well, that is part of one of my predictions for 2017 that came to pass as Daybreak announced late yesterday afternoon that their building game Landmark will shut down on February 21, 2017.
I will quote the official announcement as it is on the Landmark site which, according to the FAQ, will be going away with the game.
To the Landmark community,
With heavy hearts, we are writing today to inform you that after much review, we have decided to close Landmark game servers on February 21, 2017.
Since Landmark first entered Alpha, we have been impressed by the creative talents in this community. You pushed the boundaries of what Landmark could do, and we are grateful for the time and energy you shared through your creations in this game.
While there is still time to enjoy Lumeria and the many worlds you’ve built within Landmark, we wanted to let you know what you will be seeing happen between now and February. Beginning today, Player Studio items will no longer be available for listing or for purchase in the Landmark Marketplace. Landmark will also no longer be available for purchase. All items in the Marketplace with a Daybreak Cash price will have their price reduced to 1 DBC.
The game servers, as well as the accompanying forums and social media channels, will be closed at 4:00PM Pacific Time on Tuesday, February 21, 2017.
We want to thank each and every one of you for your creative contributions to Landmark.
Daybreak Game Company
There is also a FAQ which covers the same points. The only potentially interesting item is the bit about the code, and I could have guessed that.
What happens to all the code/data from Landmark? Can someone open an emulator server for Landmark?
Daybreak Game Company will retain all of the code and data from Landmark. Daybreak Game Company will not license or authorize the operation of a Landmark emulator or a fan-operated Landmark server.
Landmark itself was the child a difficult set of circumstances. Initially announced as a “down the list” bullet point as part of the reboot of the EverQuest Next project, it was just supposed to be a tool to allow players to help the then SOE team build EQN. Everybody was much more interested in the whole Story Bricks connection, the emergent AI story, the sandbox nature of the game, the destructible environment, and the graphical style of EverQuest Next.
But then EverQuest Next Landmark, as it was initially known, started to gain a life of its own. In what felt to me like something of a cash grab (successful by all accounts), with maybe a side goal of extracting some of the Station Cash that players had been hoarding, Landmark launched into what I called real estate speculation. While some were enthusiastic about the idea…
… sorry Keen, you’re just the poster child for enthusiasm…
…others cast a more jaundiced eye on the whole thing.
Ars Technica Reports…
The game was shaping up into a higher resolution Minecraft where you had to claim small plots of land and put up with neighbors. Not an ideal scenario in my opinion, but if it helped SOE build EverQuest Next, a lot of people were willing to pitch in and pay money up front for a game we were told was eventually going to be free to play.
About six months after the big SOE Live announcement, the game shed the EverQuest Next prefix and became simply Landmark. Early access started and there was some enthusiasm. I ended up getting a couple of seven day free trial invites, but there wasn’t enough there for me to consider paying ever $20 to play the game, or even the $6.79 price that was available during the Steam Summer Sale in July of that year. Rather, that price cut, the slow pace of development, and the usual SOE lack of news was making me wonder where the game was headed.
Time ambled on, as it tends to. As 2014 dragged along SOE got busy cutting games, knocking out Wizardry Online, Vanguard, Free Realms, and Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures. SOE Live came and went with some demos (with faked AI) but no real news. And then, as we got into 2015 the big news dropped, that SOE had been sold to the private equity firm of Columbus Nova. That explained the cuts and probably the lack of news, but EverQuest Next and Landmark were still on the list of games.
The newly formed Daybreak Game Company told us everything would be fine, with Smed touting their new “indie” status, which would allow them all sorts of freedom to do things… like develop for the XBox. So far that “indie” freedom has yielded a DC Universe Online port.
As the five year mark from the initial EverQuest Next announcement passed, I began to wonder if it would ever be a thing. Six months later, EverQuest Next was officially cancelled. But Landmark yet lived, and Daybreak was quick to announced that it would ship “soon,” which was later revised to “before summer.” It wasn’t going to be free any more. It would be buy to play, with a cost of $9.99, but if you spent more on an early access package, you were still covered. If you just had one of those access codes from a buddy who put down $99 for a Trailblazer pack though, you still needed to pony up the $9.99.
Landmark officially launched on June 10, 2016, beating the first day of summer by more than a week, after which it sort of disappeared into obscurity as the small group of players devoted to the game happily toiled away… until yesterday.
And now the last day for it will be February 21… giving it a post-launch life of 8 months and 11 days… after which the last remaining piece of EverQuest Next will disappear. The final notation in the now six year long tale. I will save the summing up of my posts and such for the last day. That will give me a bit of time to reflect for a final summing up of a story six and a half years in the making.
I am going to have to think about revising that post about SOE and its MMORPG history. Out of 22 titles I listed out, just six now survive. (Not sure what the eventual relationship will be with DDO and LOTRO.)
Meanwhile, others out there are reacting to the news:
- Massively OP
- EQ2 Wire <=== The one with the dirt you want
- MMO Fallout
- ECTMMO
- Contains Moderate Peril
- Aywren Sojourner
- Bio Break
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