I wish I could say nobody saw this coming, but unfortunately, the writing has been on the wall for a while: Gameforge announced this morning that it’s sunsetting the western version of Swords of Legends Online aka SOLO. In what might just be the most honest sunset announcement I’ve ever read, the company candidly admits that the game just couldn’t compete in the existing MMORPG market.
“It is with great sadness that we at Gameforge today announce the shutdown of Swords of Legends Online effective 30th June 2023. This difficult decision has been made in mutual agreement between Gameforge and developer Wangyuan Shengtang Entertainment, following several months of discussions as we carefully considered the overall MMORPG landscape, and explored every possible avenue for keeping the game going. The MMO market is fiercely competitive, and despite our best efforts – including the release of the 2.0 update, making the game free to play, as well as further content patches along the way – we’ve found that the player numbers simply aren’t strong enough to sustain the game and the high-quality fantasy MMORPG experience that Swords of Legends Online players deserve.”
Payment processing has already been turned off, although players are able to spend down their remaining cash-shop balances and take advantage of 90% discounts in the store. No sunset events are en route.
Gameforge says that because of the GDPR, it can’t transfer accounts to the Chinese developer maintaining the Chinese version of the game, so your characters will be irretrievable. The team invites players to migrate to Aion or Metin2 instead.
We checked in on the game twice since the start of the year, both times finding that the game’s new content stream had dwindled to nothing and that the remaining playerbase was obviously feeling a bit hoodwinked by a temport. The game launched less than two years ago in July of 2021 and claimed to have sold 200,000 copies in its first few days, and our own Four Winds columnist Carlo adored it. But unfortunately, once the content slowed down and the players started leaving, the content slowed down more and the players kept leaving, and it appears to have become a situation Gameforge and Wangyuan Shengtang didn’t find a way out of.
Condolences to the staff and players affected by the sunset.
