The long most expensive MMO from Korea fails grandly – closes after 2 years on Steam

The mixture of RTS and MMORPG sounds pretty good at first. But despite positive reviews, the MMO Kingdom Under Fire 2 will close its servers in October. On Steam, 14 players last played on average. What went wrong?

That’s the bad news: In a newsletter from the publisher Gameforge, the team behind Kingdom Under Fire 2 announced that the MMORTS will close its servers forever. In-game purchases can no longer be made and the title can no longer be purchased on Steam either.

If you have the game, you can continue playing until October 26th. On that day, Kingdom Under Fire 2 will cease operations and the MMO will be dead.

Gameforge also writes in the newsletter that they are grateful for the good time with the game and that they will always be fondly remembered. “We can look back on epic mass battles, hordes of enemies and especially on a unique community,” the letter continues.

Why is it? We don’t know the exact reason, but the very small number of players will definitely have contributed to the decision. The MMO also has its own launcher, the numbers of which we don’t know, but recently an average of only 14 people played the game on Steam.

Even these 14 active fans represented a 29.42% increase over the previous month (via steamcharts). This suggests that operating the title is no longer worthwhile for the publisher.

Players criticize the poor development of Kingdom under Fire 2

How is the community reacting? Since the announcement of the server closure, the game has received a lot of negative reviews on Steam. Although it is actually a good game, many users agree that it was “left to die”.

The title came on Steam in 2019 and was no longer supplied with new content after just a few months, which some fans denounce and see as the reason for the dwindling number of players.

Some other fans are still leaving new, positive reviews and express their sadness about the end of an “actually good MMO”. The user Rob writes after 62 hours of play (via Steam): “A good game that captured the qualities and the feeling of its predecessors. […] It’s sad to see the game go away and the servers go down. I can only hope that at some point there will be a successor that focuses on the single player. ”

Fans are disappointed and angry

This causes trouble: The business model of the game has changed, so it was originally announced as a Free2Play game, but then appeared as a Buy2Play title. The game had been significantly reduced since April 2020 (via steampricehistory). The low price now comes across to an author of a negative Steam review, who probably only discovered the lower price at a later point in time and thought it was a sale.

In October 2020, the developer confirmed to us in an interview that there are no plans to discontinue Kingdom Under Fire 2. However, we cannot say how quickly the decision to discontinue the MMORTS was ultimately made.

How things will continue is still uncertain, or whether a new Kingdom Under Fire could be in development. The game certainly had its niche, but could not retain enough fans in the long term.

How did the development go? Kingdom under Fire 2 has a very long and exciting history of development, which we have already completely summarized for you. The game already cost 78 million dollars to develop in 2017 and it can be assumed that these costs will have increased until 2019. According to the game director, it has long made it the most expensive Korea MMO of all time. Here are the key data:

• In 2009, Kingdom under Fire 2 was originally announced for the PS3 and Xbox 360. Then there was no more information for a long time
• In 2016 there was news about the game and it was back, at a time when many fans had almost forgotten the title
• As early as 2017, the title is said to have cost over 78 million US dollars to develop, which made it the most expensive Korea MMO of all time in 2017, according to the game director. In 2019 the game was released after a total of 12 years of development, but only for the PC
• Work on the PS4 version of the title was stopped as early as January 2021
• Finally, Gameforge decided not to continue operating the game in October 2021