Perpetuum

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

~ the last words ~

Budapest, roughly ten people, five years of work and eighteen months of beta before anyone was allowed to pay for it. Avatar Creations existed to make one game and Perpetuum was it: a single persistent world on a planet called Nia, where humans had hacked into an alien robot species and were piloting them remotely to strip the place of energy. You flew nothing. You walked a customizable robot across terrain, between islands linked by teleports, and the islands were graded by how legal it was to shoot you on them.

The comparison everybody reached for was EVE Online with the ships put on the ground, and the studio never really argued with it. Skills accumulated in real time whether you were logged in or not. Manufacturing and the market were run by players rather than by vendors. The parts of the world where the good materials were also happened to be the parts where nobody was stopping anyone from killing you.

It went live on 25 November 2010 with a subscription. Terra Incognita followed in May 2011 and Gamma Frontier in June 2012, the second of which added twenty-four islands you could terraform and build settlements on, which is an enormous amount of world for a team that size to be maintaining.

~ the record ~

~ the arithmetic ~

In April 2014 the subscription went away, replaced by a one-off purchase, and the game turned up on Steam through Greenlight. That is the move a small studio makes when the recurring revenue has stopped recurring, and it bought them another three years rather than solving anything.

Perpetuum was never going to be large. A sandbox with a player-run economy needs population the way a fire needs air, and this one was competing for the same few thousand people who were already committed to a bigger game with the same shape. By the end the price on Steam had been cut to five dollars, which is what a studio charges when it has stopped expecting the number to matter.

I never had an account here, and my interest in this one is not nostalgic. I am an engineer, and ten people keeping a single-shard persistent world with a player economy running for seven years is a number that should be looked at more often than it is. Teams of that size normally ship something you can turn off at night.

~ the last blog post ~

In September 2017 Avatar Creations announced that active development was over and that they were working on a standalone server anyone could run. On 16 January 2018 they said the hardware itself had to go, on the 25th, because the monthly bill for it had outlasted the reasons to pay it. One team member volunteered to keep the database alive on a semi-official private server, described in the announcement as strictly a no promises made gig.

The final developer post read: "This is probably the last blog post here from me, but Perpetuum became a big part of our lives and we couldn't forget it even if we tried. We are immensely grateful to everyone who has played Perpetuum in the past and to the people who dedicate time to help it live on, well... perpetually."

They meant it. The server source code went out, the Open Perpetuum project put a community server up on 14 April 2018, and the game went free on Steam in August 2021 so that anyone could connect to it. The official website is still standing in 2026, still serving its own front page, with a maintenance notice from August 2012 sitting in the markup underneath. The studio turned off the machine and left the building exactly where it was.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »