URU Live terminated
Rand Miller, co-creator of Myst, has just announced on the URU forums that the decision has been made to pull the plug on URU Live, the massively multiplayer component of the latest game in the Myst series.
The goal with URU Live was to offer new content on a subscription basis. However, too few people subscribed to make this goal feasible. "We were just not able to sign up the number of subscribers (even for free) necessary to pay for that effort," Rand writes in his letter.
The content that's been produced at Cyan Worlds will be reused and sold as expansion packs. Miller also reveals that work is in progress on a Mac version of the singleplayer URU.
Cyan Worlds' original vision for URU -- a game played exclusively online through broadband connections -- has slowly crumbled apart. Before its official announcement, Rand Miller merely hinted their intentions were "to define a new form of entertainment". During the course of five years, the project went under various codenames, such as Mudpie, Myst Online and Parable. In 2003 it was decided, perhaps at the urging of publisher Ubi Soft, to create a traditional boxed singleplayer option that would serve as a 'teaser' for what was soon dubbed URU Live. Players would have to pay a monthly fee of $13 for online play, but it never came to that. Today, URU Live has become Uru Dead, and gone with it have all of Cyan's wild ambitions.
A "Prologue" to URU Live -- essentially a public Beta -- was included with the boxed product. It has been criticized by players for being too buggy, not offering enough gameplay, and servers being too unstable. URU Live never went beyond beta phase.
In his letter, Rand Miller thanks everyone for their continued support, saying "the soul of Uru Live will live larger" and "nothing can kill the community".
The first expansion pack, called To D'ni, will be available for free "in a month or two".
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