Masthead to shut down Earthrise servers today

Massthead has announced it's shutting down its sci-fi, open-world sandbox MMORPG, Earthrise, due to various issues such as quality and lack of financial backing.

According to the studio's director, Earthrise, which was scheduled to go free-to-play this year, needed at the least another four months before switching over to the new model, and the firm lacked not onlu the resources required for the extra work but was also in need of an investor. Something the firm has yet to find.

“One year after the launch of the game, we have decided to stop the Earthrise servers," said Atanas Atanasov in a statement. "Earthrise was released too early and did not meet the expectations of its fans. We did our best to revive the game in 2011, but the time was not enough to keep up with the user requirements.

"We tried to make better game in terms of server and client performance. That means to us that we had to fix over 100 problems, reported by you or by our Q&A team, before we start the F2P model. However the latest internal test showed that we need at least 4 more months to complete this task. It is too long period, and we don't have the resources to do that. Atanas did his best to find investors, but it is a very hard task during the world economical crisis."

Atanasov went on to say that the developer doesn't plan on abandoning the MMO entirely, but it will instead be "postponed for better times" should an investor or publishing agreement be reached.

"We even thought to continue providing services for game for free, but it would still require investments," he said. "Instead of that we decided to focus on other projects. Meanwhile we will keep the Earthrise forums and we will still use them. I hope one day I will put much better news there.

"I hope that one day an independent studio will be able to release the long-anticipated, open-world sandbox MMO, which everyone is talking about, but no one is making. We tried, but did not succeed. We would like to apologize to those who were disappointed from Earthrise and to thank everyone who supported us during the years."

For the time being, though, the game will shutter today.

Thanks, TenTonHammer.