LEGO Universe To Shut Down 121
CmdrStone writes "The Universe is ending in the eyes of LEGO. (Cheap pun, I know.) From the announcement: 'We are very sad to announce that LEGO Universe will be closing on January 31, 2012. This was a very difficult decision to make, but unfortunately LEGO Universe has not been able to attract the number of members needed to keep the game open.' It's too bad; I enjoyed playing this game with my kids. Open sourcing the game would be nice."
Re:Open Source an MMO? (Score:3, Informative)
Why not? As much as I would like to see it, I doubt it's going to happen. At the very least, they should allow you to export your models into the Lego Designer tool. Some people really made some elaborate models. My kids were devastated by this announcement.
Re:Man they screwed up! (Score:5, Informative)
You have summed it up quite nicely here. I also was a beta tester. After the game was released I quit playing it since I was done (end of content). Next my wife picked it up and my two boys (6 and 10) loved playing it too. I didn't have a problem slapping down the 80 euros for a year subscription. It's a small amount if three people enjoy the game. Although it's very unfortunate you can't play together.
From what I heard about it they have 2 million players, of which about 100.000 are paying ones. I have NO idea what it costs to run a service like this, but you would think that 100.000 paying subscribers would go a long way.
What I really liked was the fact that you could win real Lego prizes. They had some fun contests that, if you were #1 after a week, would get you one or more real boxes of Lego in the mail. Our Lego collection has been updated with a few nice additions :)
I really liked the idea of introducing the MMO(RPG) concept to my children using Lego Universe. They see me playing LotRO so they have a good idea of how an MMO works. With Lego Universe they had a chance of doing the same on their own level. I am really sorry to see it go.