This week, we got news of the final, formal shutdown of Final Stand: Ragnarok, which is a game that you were probably surprised to learn hadn’t already shut down, if you even remembered it existed in the first place. It wasn’t surprising. The game was a spinoff of Camelot Unchained, an MMORPG that has been in testing for roughly four hundred years and now seems to have not fans as much as an army of hate-watchers dedicated to seeing it launch and crash and burn. Whether or not that actually happens, we won’t know for quite some time.

In fact, we’re expecting an update on that later this afternoon. But regardless of what you might think about it, it at least seems like it might want to launch at some point, which puts it in a different category from some other crowdfunded MMO projects. And this is something that I keep coming back to and that keeps galling at me. I’m sitting here after years of writing about these projects. In 2012, I was watching people claim that Star Citizen was going to be the perfect beautiful sandbox that shows everyone who don’t think that sounds fun how stupid and wrong they are. It is now 2025, and I feel more confident than ever that game is never going to release at all, much less meet anyone’s expectations.

To be clear, I’ve previously written about how Star Citizen cannot possibly meet expectations. But at this point I feel like any real release is missing the point from first principles. After all, we’re talking about a game that has made an entire economic system out of selling pictures of ships that don’t exist. Yes, I know that it’s supposedly launching in 2027 or 2028, but I also remember when it was supposedly launching in 2014. I will believe a date when an actual date is announced and it sticks with two months to go.

And that’s because at this point the developers are no longer selling you a game. They are selling you the roleplay of a game. They are selling you a culture and an idea that you can fantasize about that you will never get to play. No matter how underwhelming or unfun or whatever the current build is, you can always deflect and defend it because it isn’t actually the finished version. The finished version will be better, even if you have no idea how.

It reminds me of Ashes of Creation, honestly.

Did you read up on the recent drama that was swirling around that game’s testing? It was interesting, but it wasn’t really interesting for the reasons that the people deeply committed to it thought it was interesting. It was interesting because it was internecine bickering over irrelevant drama in a video game that isn’t launched. And there’s no obvious path to launch in the first place. It’s just anger and bickering over nothing, pretending at this being a live game that’s permanent and immutable as if that has ever existed, like being tried for obscenity because you drew a crude simulation of bare breasts on an Etch-a-Sketch.

Ironically, Intrepid is another studio that had a spinoff connected to the Kickstarted MMORPG, or at least it did at one point before it was ignored by most people and ultimately didn’t go anywhere before closing down. And yet Ashes of Creation persists. When will it launch? Who cares? That’s not actually a development goal at this point, whether or not the developers want to say that, because at this point it’s actually counterproductive to release.

Consider the following: A few years back, I did a column on crowdfunded MMOs that were notable, and of that list, basically two entries of it have launched and been reasonably successful. The vast majority don’t ever make it to launch. The ones that do usually flop pretty badly. It turned out that giving Richard Garriott money and no oversight to make the game he wanted resulted in a game people did not actually want to play. Crowfall released, then it got sold off for scrap, then it got scrapped too. It’s never actually coming back and we all know it.

Development operations like the ones behind Ashes of Creation and Star Citizen aren’t wrong insofar as the cost of launching is higher than the cost of not doing that. Remaining as what amounts to pre-release titles playing the hits to a crowd of diehards is profitable enough to keep the act going. There’s no actual benefit to making all of the claims about these games falsifiable.

And yes, I keep finding myself going back to the rise of crowdfunding as a moment that was going to change development forever. There were all these games that were going to launch and totally change the landscape and usually hearken back to old-school impulses. Remember Embers of Caerus and how that game hit its target mark for crowdfunding, then encouraged people to chip in just to fire a warning shot across the bow of big companies?

Oh, no, you don’t. You don’t remember because there wasn’t a game. There was a title that never released or even got close to release. It didn’t happen.

The thing that kind of sucks but needs to be acknowledged is that it’s not exactly a surprise a lot of online games wind up being flops to some degree. Most video games are not runaway smash hits. For every Hollow Knight: Silksong, there are four dozen other metroidvania titles that release and barely get noticed. And that’s whatever. That is what it is. I am not saying everyone should feel terrible about the fact that there is more media out there than we can consume; rather, we need to acknowledge that most of those video games do not require server infrastructure and the amount of money that MMORPGs take in order to just get a spin at the wheel.

Kickstarted MMOs were put forth as an end to the days when big risk-averse publishers wouldn’t fund new, esoteric MMOs, but that just wasn’t true. Publishers were not risk-averse because they were run by big meanieheads who didn’t want you to have your open PvP sandbox; they were averse to losing a ton of money on open PvP sandboxes. And you can look at the actual evidence to see, “Oh, gee, the people who did just toss money into that lost all that money and got nothing out of it.”

I shouldn’t really care about it, sure. I should not care that a bunch of people insisted that if studios just did X, this kind of game would be successful, and then they sank their money into a crowdfunding project that did X and then never released. But I do care because I still see people insisting projects that will never release are going to launch and then everyone will see and they’ll be proven right. This time the big-name developer who turned to fan funding in order to make the game a reality is going to produce something that really sticks to the ribs. This time it’ll be different.

And that galls me, not because I’m losing money on nothing but because it just bothers me to see a fantasy replacing reality, however unpleasant the truth might be. It’s a little thing, sure. It doesn’t really need to be said at this point that Kickstarter MMOs were a complete dead end that didn’t really produce any of sea changes that their studios promised and fans wanted. But it still eats at me.

Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.