Anno Online

» see anno-online.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Anno had been a boxed German strategy series since 1998, the kind you bought on a disc and installed. Anno Online was the version that opened in a browser tab. Blue Byte showed it at Gamescom on 15 August 2012 and put it into open beta on 26 February 2013, dropping the beta label that September. It cost nothing to start playing and ran on Adobe Flash.

Under the hood it was the engine from Die Siedler Online with an Anno painted over it. You settled an island and built a supply chain that fed itself, keeping a population content enough to grow into the next tier. There were no AI opponents and almost no military, just a rock-paper-scissors combat system against the environment. The art was close enough to Anno 1404 that people who knew the series recognized it in the first screenshot.

The economy moved slowly on purpose. Time could not be sped up without paying, and the thing you paid with was a premium currency called rubies, which you could also earn very gradually by leveling. German reviewers liked the look and complained about the pace, which is the review every free-to-play builder of that era received.

Blue Byte announced on 18 October 2016 that the game would not be developed further. It kept running anyway for another fifteen months, quietly, with nothing new arriving. The closure notice came on 29 November 2017 and took down everything attached to the name, the forums and social accounts included. It all went off on 31 January 2018.

~ the record ~

~ an Anno that fit in a plugin ~

The technical bet here has not aged well, but it made sense in 2012. Flash was how you put a real-looking game in front of somebody who would never install anything, and the browser-game business in Germany was enormous at the time. Blue Byte was one of the studios that had made it enormous. Anno Online took a well-regarded PC franchise seriously enough to rebuild it inside the plugin, with the art quality that implies.

It won the Deutscher Entwicklerpreis for best browser game in 2013 and was nominated for the Computec award the same year. Both of those prizes are German, which is most of what you need to know about where this game lived. It launched in German first, and while there were other language versions, the audience and the press and the awards all sat in one country. I did not hear about it at the time and there was no particular reason I would have.

~ two announcements, fourteen months apart ~

Free-to-play games usually die in one motion. This one died in two. The October 2016 notice said development was over, which in practice means the servers stay up and the content stops. Players who stayed did so knowing nothing further was coming.

The November 2017 notice was the real one. By then the cash shop had already been taken out, so there was no way to spend real money on the game at all, and the studio's advice was to burn down whatever rubies were sitting in the account over the coming weeks. That is a strange instruction to receive. The currency you bought had no exit and no refund, only a deadline.

~ what Blue Byte kept ~

Ubisoft gave a strategy change as the reason. The studio was pulling out of the free-to-play segment it had spent years in, to put its people onto the large international productions instead. Die Siedler Online and Might & Magic Heroes Online were left as the last browser titles on the shelf.

The mobile Anno, "Anno: Erschaffe ein Königreich", survived the cull and kept running. Anno itself went back to being a boxed game, and Anno 1800 shipped in 2019 to the best reception the series ever had.

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