The Other Hammer Falls

Warhammer’s European distributor Goa announced the imminent closure of 20 servers. Interestingly, that leaves 23 European servers open compared to 16 in the US, indicating that the bulk of Warhammer’s subscribers may be in, well, the continent where Warhammer originated.

Mark Jacobs posted a “State of the Game” address today, which didn’t address the server closures but spoke more generally about his hopes for the game’s future.

The last six months have seen an awful lot of excitement and change here at the studio.  We’ve launched another successful MMORPG but this time in the face of the worst economic conditions that most of us have ever seen.  We’ve done some things that we are very proud of, some things we regret, and some things that we are very excited about going forward.  As I’ve said about Mythic throughout the years, we are not perfect but we will always try our best to create great games.

However, he did address the closures in a post on the VNBoards:

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.