Black Prophecy

~ the goodbye ~

Reakktor Media was a studio in Hannover with roughly fifty people on it, and in late 2006 they started building a space combat MMO on the Gamebryo engine. The pitch was real-time dogfighting rather than the click-and-wait combat most space games of the period ran on, and a ship you assembled yourself out of hulls and modules rather than bought whole. Michael Marrak, a German science fiction novelist, wrote the setting: two successor species to humanity at war, the cybernetically enhanced Tyi against the genetically engineered Genides.

It showed at the Games Convention in Leipzig in 2007 and looked like it would arrive in a year or two. Then 10tacle Studios, the parent company that was funding it, went bankrupt in August 2008. Reakktor kept the project alive without a publisher until gamigo took the rights, which is how a game conceived under one business model shipped four years later as free-to-play with an item shop.

Europe got it on 21 March 2011 and North America on 13 July. It ran for eighteen months.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

The ship building was the part people liked and the part reviewers kept returning to. You chose a hull, hung components off it, and the thing you flew was visibly yours in a genre where most vessels are catalog items. Clans could build stations and expand them module by module, which gave the endgame a construction project instead of a raid schedule.

Everything around that was harder going. Crafting resolved at random, and the free-to-play conversion left the usual seams where a subscription design had been cut open. Launching in Europe in March and in North America in July also meant the population arrived in two waves into a game that needed one large one. My own MMO years had ended well before this, back on the Turkish Ultima Online private servers of the early 2000s, and by 2011 I was an engineer with a job, watching the free-to-play wave from outside it.

~ the studio ~

Reakktor had a longer history than the game suggests. It built Neocron in 2002, a cyberpunk MMO with a small permanent following, and a sequel two years after that, so running persistent worlds was familiar ground. What the studio lacked after the 10tacle bankruptcy was a balance sheet that could absorb a slow start.

A studio of fifty carrying five years of development cost into an eighteen-month commercial life is arithmetic that only works if the launch is very good, and this launch was merely acceptable.

~ the last month ~

The announcement came on 29 August 2012 and cited financial problems directly, which is more candor than most shutdown notices manage. Players had four weeks. Anyone who had bought premium currency in the previous six months was sent a voucher for credit against another gamigo title, and the servers were switched off on 26 September 2012.

Nothing survived it. There was no offline mode and no emulator project that got anywhere, and the rights never went to anyone who put the game back up. Every custom ship people had spent months assembling existed only on a server in Germany, and that server has been off since September 2012.

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