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Auran Shutting Down Fury MMO
by Eric Caoili
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August 5, 2008
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Auran Games CEO Tony Hilliam announced that the company will shut down its servers and website for player-versus-player-driven MMOG Fury within 48 hours due to the studio's inability to "find a viable business model."
Released for PCs in October 2007, Fury initially launched with a monthly subscription model before switching to free-to-play in December 2007. In a post on Fury's message board, Hilliam said that despite the change, the company struggled to keep the game running. "We have reached our time limit to find a solution that would help us keep the Fury servers open. Sadly, no solution has been found and so we have no alternative than to shut the servers"
The Brisbane-based developer also announced in December that it dismissed its entire staff as it entered into Voluntary Administration. Prior to that, Auran revealed that it downsized its staff, outsourcing development to Asia, as a result of the MMOG starting off "slower than expected."
Said Hilliam: "To the Auran team, who put their heart and soul into making Fury, thanks for your efforts. As I said many times before, we need to be much better than the competition to have a chance of succeeding. We gave it everything we had and history now judges that it still wasn’t good enough."
He continued: "Whilst this marks the end of the Fury chapter, who knows what the future may bring. There were many gems hidden within Fury and many lessons learned. Hopefully one day the full potential can be realized in some other form."
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I can understand why an entire MMO based on what was up until this point played by a small percentage of all players in MMO's who were generally immature didn't do well.