Update: This story was a miscommunication in the media. It turns out that while the servers are staying up, Ragnarok Online’s North American servers are blocking IP addresses from Europe due to these regulations. The European servers will be unaffected. Thanks, Kelekelio!
One of the MMO industry’s long-time institutions is finally calling it a day in Europe.
Ragnarok Online announced this week that it is shutting down all of its servers on the continent as of May 25th. The odd part about this story is that this sunset is happening not because of declining population or revenue but because of a new law that the game’s operator was not able to circumvent. Operation in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States will not be affected.
The move comes because of the rollout of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation on May 25th, a law which addresses exporting personal data outside of the EU. WarpPortal apparently decided that it wasn’t worth the cost to upgrade storage security to meet the new regulations and chose to shut down the game instead.
