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Battle for Graxia: Closure Announced
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Petroglyph Games has announced that its entry into the MOBA marketplace has not met with the desired results and that Battle for Graxia will be shutting down effective on June 27, 2013.
For now, please continue to play and have fun with us! We are going to spend the next month participating in matches with all of you and getting ready for our last tournament scheduled for Saturday, June 8th. There will be live videocasts of the event and a number of prizes awarded to the top players. Sometime after the tournament, we will be opening the entire store to everyone with no cost of any kind to our fans.
Once again, we greatly appreciate everyone's efforts in helping to make this game possible. Please join us until June 27, 2013 in celebration of all the great memories and fun events that made BFG such a great game to be a part of. If you haven't done so already, register a new account in Petroglyph's main forums to keep updated on the latest studio announcements. If you have any questions, please reply below or feel free to contact us directly.
Read the full notice on the Battle for Graxia forum.
Comments
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It probably will go under. The issue with The Battle for Graxia is that they didn't have proper advertising. Basically what happened was, they launched Rise of the Immortals and had a very low population, but they were hardcore. So you would see the same 100 to 200 people on at all times battling eachother. In an attempt to get a bigger playerbase they relaunched the game under the name Battle For Graxia with a few new features but it wasn't a new game. The only real issue with the game itself is that it is just more of the same in the MOBA genre. It is almost exactly the same as HON or DOTA and it just didn't feel different enough for some people to dump what they were playing to solely play this.
Altough the PVE feature of the game was kind of fun, I just couldn't stick with it over anything else.
These games need to start to innovate if they want to draw an audience, thousands of people are already playing League of Legends, Dota 2, and HoN still has a following too I believe.
That said, I am sad to hear about Petroglyph not doing well, seeing their history. It is a real shame
R.I.P.
HON has quite a big following still, almost always 40 - 80 k players logged in at a time. So more than most MMORPG's on all servers. DOTA 2 is at like 100k at almost all times, and LoL doesn't really have a guage but from what I've heard it's like 500k+
Hey, I got this great idea. Let's start development on another tower defense clone.
This is sure to generate success! Just look at League of Legends.
The core MOBA market has been filled with LoL, HoN and Dota 2.
You need to do something unique to get people playing your game. Cant just clone and think it will do.
Haha, confusing Tower Defense games for Mobas...
Sad to see them close, though honestly Moba isn't a very elaborate shoe to fill. The Everquest style MMo that EQ started (yes EQ started for those who were born before wow managed to take off) had a lot more space for diversity and change. A moba is the same scenario repeating over and over. If your following it closely, it leaves almost no room at all for change or diversity making it sheerly on characters which, lets face it, Mobas aren't THAT entertaining. Your not going to drop one Moba for another in many cases due to how established you becoming a game with the others usually not being that different.
I can see it changing up if people add more ideas but its all the "3 lanes, creeps push" deal and it feels like originality at all was tossed out the window. Sure, lot of fantasy MMOs are similiar but they leave room to change things up and add their own flavor, mobas don't really have that 'wide range' of gameplay to allow themselves to stick out above competition, its just the same thing over again.
It really is amusing how investors/development companies see the success of one or a few and decide that they can share in that success by copying them.
But I think we can learn a lot from the MOBA community on this. In the MMO community, people jump from new MMO to new MMO compalining that it's a WoW clone or just a bad game. But in the MOBA community, the players simply don't buy into the imitations at all.
A few might try it out, but in general they just ignore them. LoL and DotA2 are holding the fort with their similar but distinctive gameplay while others are showing and disappearing just as quickly.
MOBA's are pretty basic in concept, one or two maps, 10 players, go hit each other. But why they've never really expanded on the mechanics is sad.
I'd love to see a MOBA in which you cross Diablo ARPG style with the MOBA arena. You level a character in a PvE game world like a top down MMO and then end game (also during leveling) is the MOBA portion. This allows for more customization and more RPG elements in character design.
Have you not tried Smite?