Firefall

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

~ the eulogy ~

by the time firefall left beta in july 2014 my mmo years were a decade behind me. i had done that phase in the mid 2000s on turkish uo private servers, cheap desktop and cheap internet, hours i would not spend now. firefall was a big-budget f2p sci-fi shooter aimed at exactly the crowd i had aged out of. i saw the trailers and i read the layoff news. i never made an account.

red 5 studios started work on firefall around 2005 and formally announced it in 2010. the pitch was open-world planetary combat with jetpacks and a persistent shared world, free to play, and it was the studio's only game. it entered closed beta in 2011, then open beta in 2013. the 1.0 release finally shipped on 29 july 2014. by then it had eaten years of runway.

the studio never recovered. red 5 laid off 40 people in november 2015 and more in december. on christmas day 2015 many employees got a letter instead of a paycheck saying payroll could not be met. by july 2016 the whole dev team was gone. the servers kept running on skeleton support for another year until red 5 posted a 24-hour shutdown notice on 6 july 2017 and pulled the plug on 7 july.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

the pitch worked in 2010 because everyone still believed the western mmo market was going to be permanently large. wow was at peak subs and blizzard alumni were spinning out studios. red 5's mark kern had been on the wow launch team. the money followed. the trailers looked good and so did the jetpacks.

~ the unraveling ~

the game shipped features and rewrote them. the crafting loop and the world map both got redone more than once. long-time beta players kept getting told their old progression was gone. by open beta the community was already arguing about whether firefall had been better before its latest patch.

~ how it actually ended ~

the 24-hour notice was the strange part. most mmos give players weeks of wind-down and at least one chance to log in with old friends. red 5 gave one day. the studio was already effectively empty. the notice on the homepage said thanks to the community and floated a mobile version that would reward founders and existing players in some new game. that never shipped either.

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