Ever, Jane

» see everjane.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Ever, Jane: The Virtual World of Jane Austen was an MMORPG about Regency England, built by a tiny studio called 3 Turn Productions with Judy Tyrer as lead developer. It went to Kickstarter in late October 2013 asking for $100,000 and finished above it, on a pitch that was almost aggressively unfashionable: a massively multiplayer world where you were a debutante or a shopkeeper and there was nothing to kill.

It was supposed to launch in 2016. What happened in August of that year is that the open beta opened to the public, and that is as far as it ever got. For four years the game ran as a beta that anybody could join, patched irregularly by a studio small enough that three people had done most of the design, with a subscription option for people who wanted to help pay the hosting.

In December 2020 the money ran out in a very small way, and the servers were switched off on the 20th. The game had never left beta, and the farewell note on everjane.com offered it for sale to anyone who wanted to make a query with customer support.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ gossip as a weapon ~

Your character carried statistics that any MMO player would recognize structurally and nobody would recognize in content, Duty and Reputation among them. Inviting another player to a ball was a move with real consequences, because if someone of higher rank declined you, your standing dropped. If they accepted, it rose, and it rose by a different amount depending on whether they had come out of duty or out of happiness. The gossip system was the combat system.

Tyrer went a long way into the period to build this. She found evidence of Black families in the merchant gentry of Regency England and of Austen's own abolitionism, and used the research to argue that letting players pick their skin color was the historically accurate option. Some mini-games were locked by gender, hunting to the men and sewing to the women, and the developers defended that one on period grounds as well. Players who misbehaved were going to be transported to a place called Botany Bay instead of banned, a feature still unfinished when the beta opened.

Underneath, it was Unity 4.6 with a networking library called uLink, and the player database was LDAP, supplied by Symas. An MMO keeping its characters in a directory server is an engineering decision I have never seen anywhere else, and it is exactly the sort of thing a three-person team does when one of them knows a tool well.

~ the last december ~

In August 2020 the studio said out loud that the year's hardships meant they could not launch the game as planned, and ran a survey asking players whether they would pay a subscription to keep it alive. The answers were encouraging enough that by late November both paying and free players were on the newest beta patch.

By early December the real figures were public. The servers and licenses cost $500 to $600 a month, and the studio wrote that "We are at 10% of our monthly subscription goal" with a deadline of 31 December to reach the full amount. On 11 December they gave up, twenty days short of their own deadline. The notice read: "To avoid additional server costs, Ever,Jane servers will be going down on Dec. 20, 2020. It's been a great run and we have enjoyed serving you with our fun little game."

~ the asking price ~

Nobody outside the game noticed for three weeks. The MMO press picked it up on 11 January 2021, having been covering the project since the Kickstarter, and the closure had already happened over the holidays while everyone was looking somewhere else.

My own years in this genre were Ultima Online on Turkish private servers, where reputation was a real currency too and was enforced by other players carrying weapons. Ever, Jane took the weapons out and left the reputation in, which is a harder world to fill, because a room full of people with nothing to fight over has to be given something else to do. Six hundred dollars a month was the whole budget for that.

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