The concept behind Seed was unique, a massive multiplayer online game that lacks a true combat system. Replacing this system with "role playing" skills. Imagine a role playing game that actually has a game feature adopted from the genres title. Amazing.
However, the company has run out of cash and didn't finalize any deals with investors to allow them to continue production. The CEO, Lars Kroll Kristensen, had this to say:
"We’ve reached the end of the road.
For the past two months, I and a few others have attempted to sell a partnership deal to a long list of publishers and MMO companies, trying to raise the capital we needed to finish the game properly, and re-launch it in a form it, and especially you the community, deserve. While we have received a great deal of interest, we have not been able to close a deal. The harsh reality is that we have now officially run out of money, and out of options, and therefore, we cannot pay salaries, rent or hosting fees."
This is unfortunate, but a harsh reality when designing your first game. The Denmark based development company has no past track record - this was their first attempt. Very few MMO's have risen to the top without some past experience or intellectual property to work from.
World of Warcraft worked off the Warcraft concepts to design their MMO. Even Ultima Online had a huge franchise before pushing the online envelope as a frontier MMO developer. Other companies have used known names and/or storylines as the foundation for their online play.
The other large advantage to developers with prior titles is raw experience. Lars goes on to say:
"For us, it means that the dream of Seed and Runestone is over. It has been a wild, weird ride, full of frustration, triumph, joy, stress and fun, but never boredom. We have all learned incredibly much about game development, the gaming business and MMOs. We’ve made some major mistakes, and some smart moves along the way, but in the end, we simply tried to do too much, with too few funds, which I guess is a typical “Rookie”, and even veteran error. I, for one, would do it all over again, although I would do a great many things differently next time around."
Unfortunately, we won't know if an RPG based on "role" and "playing" will be successful. Perhaps, down the road, another company will come along with a larger purse and provide evidence of its possibilities. Until then, we will never know.
What we do know is that building a successful massive scale game like an MMO is hard work, requires serious cash and is always a risky proposition. Good luck to the Runestone members on their future endeavours.
If you'd like to checkout what they did accomplish, try here before they close down forever.
