Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale Is Shutting Down
Portalarium have posted a short update to the Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale Facebook page, announcing that the game will be closing down at the end of April, and will not be accepting payments after today.
To Our Valued Players,
It is with great sadness that we are announcing the end of Ultimate Collector. While it has always been our hope that Ultimate Collector would continue on, it is not possible any longer.
As of Tuesday April 16 2013 we are no longer accepting payments.
We will shut off the game servers on Tuesday April 30 2013.
We want to thank everyone that has been a part of our game and community for coming on this journey with us.
Presumably, this is — at least in part — a move that will support and bolster development on Shroud of the Avatar. Still, it’s sad to see such a rich ode to nostalgia, even one implemented as a Zynga-esque Facebook game, close down. There were some good Ultima memories to be found within it.
I really don’t see this as a good sign for Portalarium no matter how I look at it. I mean wasn’t it supposed to be the easy cheap cash on project for Portalarium? And they had Zynga distrubuting them to boot.
This ain’t exactly reassuring.
Still, with FB gaming kinda collapsing all around, it’s no wonder they moved away for the inial plan of SOTA as a social media thing.
I can only think of two reasons for this. One they’re betting the farm on SotA by sacrificing UC in order to use its team members. Two UC wasn’t making enough money to justify any team members continuing to maintain it. That the announcement happened days after a fresh injection of two million in capital is tingling my spider sense, but I don’t know what it could mean.
Well the two million is specifically for SOTA not to run Portalarium as a whole.
I mean thanks god they’re not using their KS funding to pay for a completely different game. Thatd be a crappy move.
No doubt, though Garriott is part of a larger machine which itself is responsible for delivering SotA. They could draw a hard line between Portalarium proper and Portalarium SotA, treating it like a separate studio with a separate budget, but I don’t think that is likely. I do think that they are probably moving resources toward SotA, both existing and fresh. Garriott explained that the poker game and UC were both steps toward the ultimate RPG, so maybe the less profitable bridges are being burned to fuel the next.
Well if they want Portalarium to be taken seriously as an RPG developer, it’s probably a good move. If you look at the Portalarium website right now, it looks pretty… bad. The first two games listed are a poker game and Ultimate Collector. If you didn’t know anything about it, you would assume the “Ultimate RPG” listed is just another bit of Facebook shovelware.
I would guess that Garriott has had a dramatic change of heart in regards to the sort of game he wants to make. . .
Heh, I just checked out the site for the first time in a while and, uh, yeah. 🙂 Who’s on web site duty? They SERIOUSLY need to update it and pimp their SotA progress to the max. Looks like the site hasn’t been touched in a while.
I don’t think Garriott’s had a change of heart, as he’d always said his Portalarium games were building blocks toward the ultimate RPG. I do think it’s interesting that in some interview he mentioned he was “scared” to start a Kickstarter campaign but that Chris Roberts had convinced him. Garriott and “scared” don’t really go together in my mind.
I think his main change of heart was in listening to the fans and allowing them to drive the design of SotA. I don’t think this even remotely factored in to his earlier games other than retaliation against the “D&D is devil-worship” crowd (not really fans).
I don’t think he’s had any change of heart about the kind of game he wants to make, he just changed his mind about how to distribute this game.
Smart move too. As much as we all loved the isles of boxes while waltzing through Electronics Boutique and Babbage’s in the mall, digital distribution is finding its way between the ribs of traditional publishers. The game industry is pretty insane these days, but I still hope he lays the smack down and somehow pulls off another milestone as coveted as Ultima.
Right, but I meant that in the sense that it’s pretty clear that originally, SOTA/URPG was meant to be some form of Facebook game. The aim for Portalarium was to offer “true games” on Facebook – that was the whole point of the “Portalarium Player” which would have allowed all sort of games even 3D to be playable within FB Browser games (look at the A Mythical Land which AFAIK uses the Portalarium player).
However we’ve seen how this evolved as the “Facebook games bubble” began to collapse with mobiles and tablets becoming the core of casual games and I think this (in addition to KS showing an interesting in old school games) is what led RG to go back to a definite hardcore PC game.
Yes this is more what I meant. I just worded it badly.