Warhammer Online shuts down 63 servers

Filed in archive MMORPG on March 13, 2009

What does it tell you when a massively-multiplayer online RPG closes several servers? At the top of one's head, shutting down game servers probably doesn't bode well for the MMO as a whole. But according to mythic GM Mark Jacobs' forum post, it's actually a good thing when Warhammer Online closed 43 North American and 20 European servers.

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!"

As I've already said, if WAR was a PvE game, we wouldn't have closed those servers but since WAR is RvR-centric, leaving those servers open with their current population would not be a good idea. While these servers have been low population for quite a while once we told people to transfer off of them their population dropped too low for an RvR-centric game.

Oh, and as an FYI, once again our number of paying subs in NA went up again yesterday as did our PCU (even with backing out the trial accounts). These are undeniable facts, not spin.

Speaking of population, GameSpot revealed that Warhammer Online originally had 750,000 users three weeks after its launch, but then tapered off to a current 300,000 users. So how is this "going up" again?