Near Death Studios, which picked up the rights to MMORPG Meridian 59 back in 2001, has announced that today is the last official day of the company.
Meridian 59 was created by Archetype Interactive and launched by The 3DO Company in 1995. It was known as one of the first ever 3D massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Following the closure of 3DO in 2000 Near Death Studios (created by the game's former developers) acquired the rights and re-launched the title in 2002.
Developer Brian Green used his blog to report on the status of the studio (via Gamasutra): “Today is the official last day of the company. We had hoped that M59 would be the springboard to other successes. We focused a lot of effort in getting M59 launched. Unfortunately, M59 never really grew. We were lucky that we got a lot of attention for keeping an old game alive from the press. We also had a small and dedicated group of fans willing to keep the game alive. But, the press didn't really care about our attempts to improve the game, and the fans weren't interested in trying to attract new players.
“The death knell was probably when we tried to do a massive upgrade to the client, getting an actual 3D hardware accelerated renderer instead of the Doom-era software renderer. We finished this project a few months before WoW launched, and any fanfare we tried to generate was drowned in the flood of WoW excitement. On top of that, WoW cannibalized our subscribers (like it did for many other games), so we had even less income to deal with.”
Green says the final straw was losing the firm’s billing provider. “We no longer had a credit card processor for subscriptions. We talked to another company, but after several months of false starts they told me they were dropping the project since they had sunk so much money into it without result. Which is sad, because they didn't tell me that anything was wrong until they just dropped it. While deciding how to handle the situation, it was decided that closing down the company was the best option.”
Meridian 59 will continue running but not as a commercial concern with Near Death Studios owning it.