Phoenix Dynasty Online

~ the obit ~

By the time anybody outside China could log into Phoenix Dynasty Online the game was already a year old, and it had three years left in it. Object Software, a Beijing studio, had put it out in the mainland in 2006. Ingle Games picked up the North American license, ran a closed beta from 1 august 2007 and opened the doors properly on 9 october. Vinagame took it to Vietnam. That is a normal shape for a Chinese MMORPG of that period, licensed outward in pieces to whoever would take it.

The game itself was a fantasy version of ancient China with four classes, which were the Wizard, the Assassin, the Paladin and the Priest. It had mounts, an artifact system, guild sieges and several flavors of open PvP. It cost nothing to install and nothing to play, and the money came out of an item shop, which in 2007 still felt like a slightly disreputable arrangement to anyone who had grown up paying a monthly fee or paying nothing at all.

My own MMO years went into Ultima Online private servers, which is a different economy entirely. No item shop and no publisher. Somebody ran a shard out of a box until they got tired of it, and if it closed you knew exactly who had closed it and usually why. Phoenix Dynasty was the industrial version of free, where the game costs nothing because a company somewhere has done arithmetic about your spending, and that arithmetic can be redone at any time without telling you.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the day it died ~

On 9 december 2010 Ingle Games posted the notice. The wording was "It's really a hard decision that we are going to close all Phoenix Dynasty Online servers today," and today meant today. No wind-down window, and no thirty days to spend down whatever was left in your account. No reason was given either, then or afterward, and no other publisher stepped in to take the western license.

This is the part that separates a free-to-play death from a subscription death. When a game people are paying monthly for closes, there is a billing relationship that forces at least a letter and usually a refund policy. When the game is free and the money came in through a cash shop months ago, there is nothing on the books that obliges anybody to say anything. The players had spent real money on items, and the items and the servers went off on the same afternoon.

~ what it became ~

A game called Phoenix Dynasty 2 turned up on Steam years later, carrying the name forward without much of the audience, and it has its own discussion board full of people asking whether the servers are still up. That question is the actual inheritance here. Anyone who played the first one learned the answer the hard way, which is that you cannot tell from outside, and the moment you find out is the moment it stops mattering.

Phoenix Dynasty Online was not important. It was one of dozens of licensed Chinese MMORPGs that came west between 2006 and 2010 with a small marketing budget and a five-year plan, and most of them ended roughly this way. It is worth a stone anyway, because the industry has since built the entire modern games business on the model it died under, and nobody has fixed the part where the notice and the shutdown arrive on the same day.

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