Worlds Adrift closes shop, here’s why

Bossa Studios’ MMO will be saying goodbye in July. 

British indie developers at Bossa Studios have announced that their massive, multiplayer, online role-playing game Worlds Adrift will be going out of business. This will be effective from July 2019.

Bossa Studios have also announced that they’ll be giving away free copies of I Am Bread and Surgeon Simulators to all of their Founder Captains supporters as a way of saying thank you.

But why has this MMO died? Well, the answer is plain and simple: it’s “no longer commercially viable”. Haven’t we heard that one a bunch of times already in the indie scene?

And that’s the thing with MMOs, they need constant support, updates and fixes that indie teams often can’t provide in a consistent way. It’s no surprise, really, that Worlds Adrift has to close shop. But Bossa has given some insight into the matter to further explain what’s happened.

“Worlds Adrift was an ambitious undertaking for us: a community crafted MMO built on freedom and player agency with multiplayer physics, set in a huge world”, wrote Henrique Olifiers and Luke Williams through the game’s official website. They went on to say that “Worlds Adrift has not captured the imagination of as many people as we needed to make it commercially viable”.

The world of MMOs is a strange one. With World of Warcraft and The Elders Scrolls Online being two holly exceptions, most of the games we’ve played and enjoyed for hours on end through our childhoods have inevitably perished to new trends. Even Lineage had to craft a mobile version that practically plays itself through automatic quests.

And those games I just mentioned are both from huge developers with massive resources, nothing like what we can see in the indie landscape. So, although Bossa Studios talks about a more creative approach to Worlds Adrift’s downfall, the genre itself presents an often impossible challenge in today’s gaming world.

For those of you who want to properly say goodbye to Worlds Adrift, Bossa has stated that they’ll be hosting an “End of the World event which will be live streamed on Twitch and will feature an AMA with the team”.