SOE pulls plug on The Matrix Online

By Oli Welsh Published 29 May, 2009

MMO's servers to close in July.

Daniel Myers, producer of The Matrix Online, has announced that Sony Online Entertainment will be closing down the MMO on 31st July 2009 after running it for four years.

In a post on the official forum, Myers said it had been a "long, strange trip", and promised the game's tiny but fanatical community a special "end-of-the-world event".

"It has been a good run. Where many games have fizzled out before or shortly after launch, by August we will have lived on in our home at SOE for more than 4 years. To this day, I have never worked with a community as dedicated as The Matrix Online community," Myers said.

The death knell for the unsuccessful MMO sounded earlier this year when designer and game master Ben Chamberlain moved on. Chamberlain had been single-handedly responsible for content updates to The Matrix Online for some time.

SOE picked up The Matrix Online from original developer Monolith shortly after its launch in 2005, as part of a deal with rights owners Warner Bros. to produce a DC Comics MMO - which we now know will be DC Universe Online.

Although SOE hardly turned the struggling game around, it stuck by it and its community for four years.

Myers goes on to work on promising spy MMO The Agency, which is being developed in the same SOE Seattle office that maintained the Matrix.

Blue pills all round.

Picture of Oli.

About Oli Welsh

Oli is Eurogamer's acting deputy editor and reviews editor and likes to take things one word at a time. He is among the best dressed people in South London.

Read more articles from Oli by visiting the Oli Welsh archive page.

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Comments (20) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • _LarZen_ #1 3 years ago

    No big suprise realy the game sadly did not deliver....

  • dsmx #2 3 years ago

    It had so much potential this MMO but didn't deliver really on any front.

  • Whizzo #3 3 years ago

    Matrix Online is the only MMO I have ever had to phone to cancel, the chap on the other end seemed a decent sort so I couldn't be very honest as to my reason for cancelling as I'm sure he had nothing to do with how fucking awful the game was.

  • reelbigkris #4 3 years ago

    I thought it had closed a couple of years ago...

  • AphoticCosmos #5 3 years ago

    Predictable but still sad. Yes, it got a lot of things wrong, but the combat was pretty great and the community were fun.

    Oh well, most MMOs come and go - it's a sad fact of the industry.

  • Hunam #6 3 years ago

    It's still going?

  • Rubarack #7 3 years ago

    I'd be tempted to pick up a copy in June to play the end of the world event, if it wasn't for the fact I'd have to grind my ass off to get to a level where I could see it.

  • anomagnus #8 3 years ago

    A pity.

    So much wasted potential.

  • locus2k1 #9 3 years ago

    i wonder if it will end the same way as the beta servers did, that was entertaining.

  • ZuluHero #10 3 years ago

    But if you die in the matrix you die in real life?

    and @Whizzo

    me too. It was such an archaic way of doing things, and like your experience support was so nice that I had to lie and mumble…

  • Vistrix #11 3 years ago

    Community events in this game were the best I've ever experienced.

    Too bad the gameplay sucked.

  • dr_faulk #12 3 years ago

    Probably the most depressing news story I've ever read.

  • schnide #13 3 years ago

    Er, surely red pills all round, seeing as they've just woken up to the reality that it's dead?

    Unless that's a reference to everyone having to join the "real world" again.

    ...

    I am off to hurt myself.

  • geeza2020 #14 3 years ago

    I hate...... this place, this..... reality whatever you wanna call it. Its the smell! i can taste this games stink. Its repulsive isnt it? And every time i do smell it, i feel i have somehow been..... infected by it. I hate this place, this reality whatever you wanna call it.blahbblhablaahahaah sorry

  • Gurgeh #15 3 years ago

    "Myers goes on to work on promising spy MMO The Agency, which is being developed in the same SOE Seattle office that maintained the Matrix."

    The Agency might be Matrix Online done right, there's certainly some similarities in the design.

  • BigJonno #16 3 years ago

    I wonder how many people were still playing it. Surely it can't cost them that much to keep a single server running for the die-hards, so I'm guessing it can't be more than a couple of thousand.

  • iokthemonkey #17 3 years ago

    I wonder how many people were still playing it.

    ----

    And how many of them are called "N3o" "NEEO" "Ne0" "NuNeo" or "NEEEEEOOOOOOOOOO"

  • EmiliasHorse #18 3 years ago

    I thought it closed ages ago...oh well, shame that.

  • Figgernaggot #19 3 years ago

    THE GAME WAS NOT THE ONE


    LLOLOLLOLOLRLOFLFFLFOLMAOAOAMLOLA

  • Kami #20 3 years ago

    Shame really.

    I enjoyed the closed beta of The Matrix Online. The game was a bit rough but I knew that what I was playing and giving feedback on was an unfinished game. Many of us debated intelligently about the pros and cons of the combat system, the loot system, about navigating the city and venturing out. It's what you'd expect of a closed beta - lots of people giving their thoughts and drawing up comparisons to other games, both to compare favourably and to offer a cautionary tale.

    The shit hit the fan when it went open beta. The people who had stuck together through the closed beta found themselves swamped almost completely by a flood of Matrix fans who, shall we say, would have bought anything with The Matrix attached to it. Any hint that the game wasn't working, any bug report, any suggestion to make the game better became a 10-page flurry of hate posts about not being "pure", that they should go back to Everquest or whatever, that they would tear us a new one if they saw us in real life. It was a horrid experience.

    The Matrix Online catered then for those rude, obnoxious brats who couldn't really put a case forward to improve the game - and contrary to popular myth, the actual playing communty often has a large say in where a game goes and what is added. And it suffered for it, but the damage was done - The Matrix Online and a totally awful open-beta experience put so many off. If that was who we were going to play with in live, then some of us thought best to move on.

    I'll never forget the experience, but it had promise and - here's that word - potential. It's wonderful it managed to survive this long and that a truly passionate team kept it alive, and those who stuck with it to now probably made a very tight community. But no doubt the costs in the end couldn't be balanced by the userbase, and for some of us the initial shock experience was enough to deter us from it for life.

    But on this note, SoE do have a lot of games on their books - an awful lot. I suspect The Matrix Online being closed down is to try and save some money... and I doubt it'll be the only victim of cost-cutting measures.

  • levitate #21 3 years ago

    I lost interest in Matrix after the second movie, nevermind the computer game.