This week, EA-owned Mythic Entertainment announced that it would be closing down 43 North American servers for the MMORPG Warhammer Online, and 20 servers in Europe.

The announcement has expectedly has caused speculation about the health of the game among MMO players, some saying it's the beginning of the end of the game, which just launched in September 2008.

Mythic CEO Mark Jacobs, who often takes the opportunity to speak directly to gamers via message boards, attempted to put an end to negative speculation, claiming that the server merger is not a death knell for the game. EA recently said the game has 300K subscribers.

Jacobs wrote on the IGN's VN message boards , "Over the last few months we've been telling people to transfer off the lower population servers. Over this same amount of time people have been asking/telling/begging us to merge servers.

"So, now that almost all the people transferred off those servers, we've done just that. And of course, when we do that, some people here say 'OMG Fail!'"

He explained that Warhammer Online is a Realm vs. Realm-centric game, which plays better when servers are highly-populated. "As I've already said, if [Warhammer Online] was a [player vs. environment] game, we wouldn't have closed those servers."

Jacobs also said, "...Our number of paying subscriptions in [North America] went up again yesterday, as did our [peak concurrent users] (even with backing out the trial accounts). These are undeniable facts, not spin."