On May 30, 2013, Digital Worlds announced the closure of the popular MMORPG “Silkroad”. The reason was the termination of support for the project by its developer – the Korean company “Joymax”.
This spring was the last for the world of the Great Silk Road.
In Russia, the Silkroad project was launched on December 22, 2009 – IT Territory companies worked on the release of the game (today it is part of the well–known holding “Mail.ru “) and “Digital Worlds”. On January 24, 2013, the game was completely transferred to the management of the company “Digital Worlds”.
Two months after this event, the company “Joymax” – the developer of “Silroad” – announced the termination of the release of updates and support for the servers of this MMORPG. The South Korean developer explained his decision by saying that at the moment Joymax concentrates all its efforts on developing games for mobile platforms.
Despite the fact that Joymax offered Digital Worlds not to close the project, but to leave everything as it is, the company decided to stop the MMORPG, which remained without the support of the developer. Here’s what Pavel Grigorievich Roitberg, CEO of Digital Worlds, says about this:
“Silkroad” is a really interesting project, we are very sorry to part with it. A unique setting, a well–thought-out system of classes and factions – the project definitely deserved the attention it enjoyed among the players. Unfortunately, today we simply cannot take over the support of the game, which its developers refused – the company was simply not ready for such a development.
Not so long ago, we released a new project “Digital Worlds” – the game “Alvegia Online” in an open beta test. This is a hybrid MMORPG in the MOBA genre, and now all our resources are spent on making the release of Alvegia as close as possible. Testing, project development, implementation of planned ideas – we simply don’t have time to be distracted. Therefore, as sad as it is to say, we really stopped supporting Silkroad.
I want to emphasize that the fact that we have closed the Silkroad Online servers does not mean at all that we are abandoning the players of this large-scale project to the mercy of fate. At the moment, our employees are preparing compensation for all Silkroad players – most likely, these will be bonuses that players will be able to receive in our new project.”
For three and a half years of the active life of the game, more than 900 thousand players have registered on Silkroad servers – this is a solid figure for any online project. On the last day of the game, more than 5,000 players came to say goodbye to the world of the Great Silk Road
But, the project is closed and closed for quite objective reasons. “Termination of developer support” – this phrase almost always means the death of any online game, “Silkroad” was no exception. We can only hope that it will be replaced by new – even more interesting and large–scale – MMORPGs. For example, “Alvegia Online” – you can follow the development of this project and take part in the OBT on the official website: http://alvegia.ru /.