Transformers Universe

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

~ the eulogy ~

Almost every grave on this site has a launch date. This one does not. Transformers Universe was still in open beta on the day it was announced dead and it was still in open beta on the day the servers went off, which means the thing that got buried had never officially been born. Jagex refunded every purchase, because when you close something you never released there is no other honest way to do it.

Jagex announced it in 2010 and it was a very different game then. The plan was a browser-based MMO where you built your own Transformer and took it into a persistent world, and Jagex thought enough of it to shelve its other big project, Stellar Dawn, and put the people on this instead. Closed beta testing started in 2012 and ran into 2013 without the game getting appreciably closer.

Then in February 2014 the whole thing was redefined. Character customization turned out to be very hard when the characters are robots that also have to be vehicles, so the design was rebuilt around fixed pre-made warriors and the genre was renamed. Publicly it became a massively online tactical action game, which is a MOBA with a longer name. Closed beta reopened on 12 March 2014 and open beta followed on 4 July.

By 2014 I was thirty and working, and the MOBA question had been settled for a while by League of Legends running on every cafe machine that mattered. A licensed browser MOBA arriving four years after its own announcement, into a market that had already picked, did not need me to ignore it. Almost everybody did.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was going to be ~

The 2010 version is the one worth mourning. Build your own Transformer is not a clever idea, it is the obvious idea, and it is the reason the license has value in the first place. Every kid who owned one of these toys spent time inventing a robot that did not exist. A persistent online world where that invention had a name and a record is exactly the product the property was sitting on.

What shipped instead asked you to pick from a roster of warriors somebody else designed and fight over capture points in six modes, including a twenty-kill elimination match and a co-op mode called Crisis. It was competent. It was also a game where the license had become decoration, and the pivot away from customization threw out the only thing the brand could offer that a generic MOBA could not.

~ what got buried with it ~

The money is the ugly part. A founders program announced on 25 April 2014 sold access tiers from Bronze up to a $449.99 Cybernite pack that bought a three-day head start and, at the top end, a ten-inch diorama figurine. People paid that for a game still in beta. In November 2014 Jagex downsized the team, and on 16 December it and Hasbro announced the closure with a sentence that says nothing at all: the decision came at an important time for both companies as they realigned their plans and focuses for 2015. Full closure was set for 10am GMT on 31 January 2015, and every purchase was refunded.

This was the third Jagex project in a row to end this way. MechScape was written off before release and became Stellar Dawn, which was cancelled in 2012, and 8Realms closed the same year. Jagex went back to RuneScape and stayed there. Hasbro kept licensing Transformers to other studios and got several more games out of it, none of which anyone will be writing about either. The most durable artifact from the whole four years is the header image from the old site, a finished wordmark with the word coming soon printed above it.

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