Every so often I find myself thinking about how many MMOs have actually gone dark in a given year, and so I start looking back through our list. “This year,” I think to myself. “This year I am not going to have a full number of entries for a column and so I can’t do it.” And every single time it happens, I always wind up with more than enough titles to fill out one of these columns. We’re not even into October, but yes, we already have a set of 10 MMOs and MMO-adjacent titles that have vanished back into the land of wind and ghosts.

Now, I don’t count titles that were never formally announced but canned in development or console-specific sunsets, though I am counting a few titles that we know will sunset this year but haven’t yet and are just marking time. Even with those conditions, we have plenty, and gosh is that sad to see. Especially since a lot of the titles here are pretty significant in their own way (although everyone will decide for themselves how big a shame it might be to wave farewell).

1. OrbusVR

I’ve long been pretty bearish on the prospect of VR headsets as the Next Big Thing in gaming in general, and I am not surprised in the least that they have largely failed to gain major traction. Still, it was kind of awesome that one big VR MMORPG not only launched but kept going, had a steady cadence of updates, and kept doing it thing even as a lot of other projects seemed to crash and burn. I knew this one wasn’t a major hit, but it was really nice to see it keep going, and finding out that it was finally going to sunset really was depressing.

2. Riders of Icarus

As much as I felt like Riders of Icarus had some neat concepts, those concepts never translated into a desire to play the game. In all honesty it felt like those neat concepts were just enough for it to keep getting stays of execution even as the companies managing the game left it to bounce along barely supported. But it did have fans and players. It was attractive to a population. It’s sad to see it gone.

3. Skyforge

In a world of MMORPGs where eventually power progression makes every single character feel like an incarnated deity, Skyforge dared to just start there. The weird thing about this title was that it always felt like a real attempt at taking a lot of disparate progression systems that got wedged into the same spot. It didn’t hold my attention but it was gorgeous and it managed to keep running for a long darn time, long enough that it felt like it had more juice in the tank. Alas, it’s gone now.

4. Tarisland

By contrast, here we have a title that people (myself included) were calling a blatant effort at copying an existing game before it ever launched that never, ever seemed to get any sort of attention or traction. It honestly felt like this game got pushed out the door not to meet any sort of real player demand or developer passion but because someone could machine-translate the text quickly enough to make it profitable, and that was the long and short of it. I’m sad that it never seemed to get a real shot at success, but let’s be real, another year languishing in abandonment wouldn’t have changed that.

5. Multiversus

The concept of a mascot fighter is one of those ideas that it feels like every company with an IP library wants to make work and also that every company keeps being surprised when it doesn’t work. It feels a bit like the MOBA boom where a whole lot of studios dedicated themselves to making their version of the game… and promptly watched the games fail to get traction because the total number of successful games in that genre always topped out at about three, four or five if you account for places where studios tried to buy their ways into the winner’s circle. Unfortunately, this one had a protracted development that involved a pull back from open beta into a pseudo-relaunch that really did not help uptake but did help kill any momentum it had generated.

6. Legends of Aria Classic

I can’t say that this one hurts just because if you have followed Legends of Aria over the past few years it felt like a foregone conclusion. Like, I have not forgotten the game being sold to a crypto studio that never actually made or released its reboot of the game at all, which ultimately just left the original game to relaunch and try again and fail to gain traction because the whole reason it got sold to a crypto studio was that it hadn’t really landed. But the game did have fans and as much as I might point out that there’s a degree of the developers bringing it on themselves… this was a crowdfunded game, you know? People pitched money in to make this happen. They’re kinda the victims here, really.

7. Dauntless

This might sound cold of me, but I honestly felt like the writing was on the wall for Dauntless once Capcom realized that people loved the idea of hunting monsters in multiplayer. As soon as the real thing was not just available but being promoted, it was harder to sell people on “what if the store brand version” and it wasn’t helped one whit by Phoenix Labs’ behind-the-scenes instabilities. Still, this one was a long-time game, and seeing it fold is… unpleasant. A lot of these titles were in the solid mid-tier performance space and it’s never fun to be reminded how precarious that space really is.

8. Dual Universe

Another crowdfunded title, Dual Universe has a lot of creativity baked into it from the start but it never really connected with a larger playerbase for a variety of reasons. That doesn’t mean that I think it’s a good thing it’s gone or somehow deserved; unlike our prior crowdfunded title in this lineup, this project never descended into really shady business practices. It was just a good idea that didn’t connect. It still lives on to some extent, but it’d be a lie to say that it didn’t sunset.

9. XDefiant

This always seemed like a weird pitch to me. Like, this was very much a mascot FPS, and that already seems like a weird reach, but it becomes even weirder because it’s a mascot FPS from Ubisoft. I do not associate that company’s games with super-memorable characters, mostly consisting of Tom Clancy’s shooterman stand-ins and whoever the latest not-technically-a-ninja on the front of an Assassin’s Creed box might be. Except the last one was actually a ninja, so that’s technically getting less creative. The point is that it always seemed like a long stretch to get to a game people really wanted, and yet it made it to launch and then… fizzled.

10. Velev

You couldn’t even make it a full week? I know this game wasn’t made solely with the purpose of making sure that Concord couldn’t claim any “fastest shutdown” records, but… it sure sorta feels like it, huh?

Everyone likes a good list, and we are no different! Perfect Ten takes an MMO topic and divvies it up into 10 delicious, entertaining, and often informative segments for your snacking pleasure. Got a good idea for a list? Email us at justin@massivelyop.com or eliot@massivelyop.com with the subject line “Perfect Ten.”