Globaled: Gameglobe to shutdown at the end of November
It can be a sad time announcing a game's untimely departure, especially if that game attempted to do something at least moderately different from the crowds of clones crowding the small span of space that is our attention. Gameglobe's demise is particularly frustrating, because the game seemed to have gone to great lengths producing something akin to LittleBigPlanet on PC.
Unfortunately, an interesting premise is not immune to poor execution and Gameglobe suffered greatly because of this. The MMO originally enticed fans with the ability to create unique game experiences within Gamegobe itself, but locked new items away, forcing players to grind excessively in order to continue building. With the move from publisher Bigpoint to Square Enix, Gameglobe tried a new route, opening up all items to players in exchange for a monthly subscription fee.
As you can imagine, the addition of a monthly fee (even an optional one) was ill received, and Sqaure Enix reversed its decision, going so far as to open up all build items permanent to everyone. Still, efforts made on behalf of Gameglobe's continued existence were in vain. An official announcement on the Gameglobe forums from the developers thanks the community for their enthusiastic support, but laments that they "just not been able to make it work".
Gameglobe will officially stop service a week from today, on November 29th. Perhaps its failure is an indication that some B2P game designs (such as LittleBigPlanet) simply do not work as well when straddled with a typical F2P monitezation scheme. Why do you think Gameglobe Failed?
About the Author
Michael Dunaway has been part of the MMOBomb team for years and has covered practically every major Free-to-Play MMO title since 2009.
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- lot of crap and xp-grind maps flooded the mission pool so it was hard to find anything good besides developer picks of the week.
- locking most of the stuff behind a grind/pay wall lead to the flood of xp grind maps in the first place
- lack of multiplayer, at least during the time I played. Sure, you could share your adventure and action maps, but you could not share the experience of playing through them together with friends.
Kind of sad, cause at it's core it was a rather powerful but easy to use sandbox for creating little action adventure scenarios.
I think it failed because it was online only. Who wants to spend tons of hours crafting levels when they could disappear any day? Maybe I'm just old fashioned and too reverent but when I create stuff I want it to last. I have tons of creative type games and game makers that only had a one time fee to purchase. They allow me to save my works offline and share online at no additional costs, some even have multiplayer. I can't understand why they chose such a crappy model. The only thing I can imagine that they thought they could make the most money off it that way. The only types of games that should be online only are game that really need to be online only to function, like MMOs for example.
Gameglobe did have multi-player towards the end but I did not have any luck syncing up with anyone but I only tried it briefly once.
Farewell to any Mmobombers-gameglobers TheSecondJoker
I'm glad it's shutting down
Also, the ability to create and share levels is not exactly new and i don't think it is something that will be popular with todays generation.
What we need rather badly is innovation yes but not by player mind (we can suggest but we should never build), it is the devs/sponsors of all those many companies who need to wake the f@ck up already and start to produce quality instead of quantity.