Earthrise Going Offline Today, F2P Version Could Launch Later

In a post to the Earthrise forums, Masthead Studios team member “The Editor” reveals the press release that they’ve sent out worldwide this morning announcing that their post-apocalyptic sci-fi MMORPG will be going offline today. It’s hard to say if this is directly tied to the settlement between Bethesda and Interplay (since Masthead was working on Fallout Online), but at least they give some hope that the game could be resurrected later as the promised free-to-play version if there is “investor or publisher interest”. He (or she) then goes on to explain that it was going to take four months to complete the F2P version, which they simply couldn’t afford:

“Sofia, Bulgaria – February 9, 2012

Masthead Studios announced today that it will be shutting down the Earthrise servers on 9th of February. (One year after the launch of the game, we have decided to stop the Earthrise servers. Earthrise was released too early and did not meet the expectations of its fans) said Atanas Atanasov, Director of Masthead Studios. (We did our best to revive the game in 2011, but the time was not enough to keep up with the user requirements. There is a huge interest in high quality open world sandbox MMORPGs, unfortunately the big publishers do not show any interest in the genre. It is unfortunate that low budget companies like ours are trying to bring innovativeness in the already saturated MMO market. I hope that one day an independent studio will be able to release the long anticipated open world sandbox MMO, which everyone is talking about, but no one is making. We tried, but did not succeed. We would like to apologize to those who were disappointed from Earthrise and to thank everyone who supported us during the years.)

The free to play version of Earthrise, which was planned for 2012 may be released only if there is investor or publisher interest.”

This is the official announcements that we sent as press-release to the gaming sites. However we think that you, our players, deserve to know the situation in details.

We tried to make better game in terms of server and client performance. That means to us that we had to fix over 100 problems, reported by you or by our Q&A team, before we start the F2P model. However the latest internal test showed that we need at least 4 more months to complete this task. It is too long period, and we don’t have the resources to do that. Atanas did his best to find investors, but it is a very hard task during the world economical crisis.

We don’t abandon the Earthrise project completely. But it will be postponed for better times. We even thought to continue providing services for game for free, but it would still require investments. Instead of that we decided to focus on other projects, but it will be Ostiak, who can give additional information. Meanwhile we will keep the Earthrise forums and we will still use them. I hope one day I will put much better news there.