It's Official - End of EQNext

Fast work: the website is already gone. So if you wanted to keep the EQ Next short stories and novelas, it's too late.

no surprise at all
development at soe was like a traffic circle .and the only way out was into a new traffic circle.
they cancelled everything for eq next ,just to start that all over ,because it was too similiar to free realms.
after restart of eq next development ,they stopped that free realms game (that brought good money )

its sad ,but the only thing thats worth something ist the eq franchise.
maybe some company will buy the rights to make a new game .eq and eq2 will sufffer till the last cent ist
squished out of the customers ,and then they will die ....horrible vision ,but im afraid the truth

Let's bare in mind CN is an investment company. If they saw no investment in the future of EQNext it is not surprising it has gone.

If they see good returns on investment for EQ1/EQ2, (Rumoured to be one of the few profitable DBG ventures), then we are likely to continue to see investment.

It's not unheard of for a business to cut lose the unprofitable parts.

The bolds are mine. Um, NO. Free Realms cost megabucks for platform security updates (the cost of which scales with the user base), and nobody but nobody was actually paying for Free Realms, so it went down in a burning ball of flame after running in the red for years. Whether it had millions of players or hundreds of thousands or whatever actually hurt it more than helped it, because practically every family was just using it as the free electronic babysitter. Smed (who explained the whole thing on Reddit after the fact) said he and SOE put off closing it for as long as they did because "then people stop trusting you." Please don't make up nonsense.

I often wonder if SOE/Daybreak reused the Free Realms engine for EQNext more because they had to financially (to help offset its development costs, which were never recouped). Game engines are very costly to lease. The EQ franchise has its own-- based largely on CPU scaling instead of GPU scaling-- which, over the years, held it back a bit, but I don't know that the EQs would still be running today if they had to lease their engines.

Heck, even megabillionaires Blizzard are reusing the Titan engine to make Overwatch!

I wonder if this will have an impact on in game Krono prices. A lot of people were hording them because they would presumably be of some benefit (sub time, in game trading for a leg up at launch, etc..) in EQNext. Now, not so much...

I don't think nearly as many EQ2 players were hinging their future on EQNext as it has presented itself over the years as you might think. Personally, I am saddest at this news not because I really cared either way about EQNext (it didn't really seem like it would be my cuppa), but because of what it portends for Daybreak and the future of the surviving Everquest franchise in general.

Where are refund's for Landmark buyer's? I paid for it to help fund EQNext not play a glorified minecraft simulator, have been a paying customer since 2003 because of the Everquest franchise and to see a company think it's customers are dumb and stupid because it was sold to a investment company and six month's from now when everything get's sold off and not one person will be left from the dev team, I truly feel bad for you guy's but you I will never buy a SOE/DBG game again.

I have a feeling this is the beginning of the end.... I bought Landmark for hopes of EQ:N, now I want my refund. If I wanted to play a building game, I'd go back to Minecraft.

All the unfortunate Landmarkers are realizing why I don't do Kickstarters or pay for a glorified Beta. I want to see a completed project before I pay. Most of the time, if a project is worth funding, it doesn't need to beg everyone.

I got my moneys worth out of landmark
Was well worth it to me

They are probably just broke from buying SoE and couldn't afford to keep investing in EQN. But well just take a look at the mess day break is doing with H1Z1. I wouldn't be surprise if they just go bankrupt soon.

We just found how untrustworthyt his compagny is, all the founding from landmarks wasted and h1z1 beeing in alpha (that you must pay) and they even now split the game in 2 (but not the price)

Ready to release EQOA on PC yet??

EQOA wasn't it the crappy MMO they released on PS ? Its failed so much that I had problem to find a copy to buy lol

About EQN... It's sad news. I did not like the cartoon style but the game still sounded interesting and of course I would have bought it with no questions asked. Too bad. I'm always down for a new EQ game no matter what it is.

About EQ2... I guess I've been away now for about 9 months but maybe I'll come back for a visit in June. It's still good old EQ and feels like home, despite not being interested in current end-game content.

About Dominion (League of Legends Mode)... Dominion was retired recently from LoL and that was much much sadder news. The sad thing is, the mode probably had more daily players than EQ2 does. Just bringing it up since it happened a few weeks ago.

I do still hope there is a future for a new EQ MMO one day!

I do believe they are moving away from free to play and all access. Any staff from EQN that has not already been reallocated to other titles will either get laid off or moved to H1Z1 and PS2 to help out most likely on console ports of those titles and the xbox launch of their console titles if they still plan on doing it. Don't see many people on PS2 these days, and they just merged the Play station and PC servers of DCUO into one cross platform server due to lack of players causing insane que times.

I doubt they will ever add more to the eq and eq2 teams. it just does not make good business sense when they can launch two games at once with a skeleton crew ( even though its really just one game that had its instanced multiplayer pvp mode separated and sold as its own game) and make a profit. Buy to play with a cash shop is the new hot game model and i think we are going to see a lot more of it from DBG.

not to mention H1Z1 was originally going to be free to play.

I'm a bit 50/50 pm this. I personally thought the art style looked great although I would again prefer the more realistic style. Two things killed my interest in this and other MMOs, first the proposed control style moving over to console style controls, that can't be a good thing and the ongoing push for money grabs in MMOs generally that turns me off, I really liked the look of BDO but i'm not going to bother with any cash shop advantage nonsense anymore.

Still, behold a couple of screenshots I took of the launch announcement. EQ next ,we hardly knew ya.

Daybreak, you suprised me.
You not even kickas-sed the europeen community...
concratulations !!

but dear paying User, don't be sad, you now can spend Game-.... ( äh, sorry, DAYbreak your money
by buying some pink ducks ( or meatbeasts...) !!!!!

Way to love the franchise so you can make game's like H1Z1 not one person is recommending to play the game on steam nothing has changed from the SOE day's I guess a company with it's head in the sand and sinking fast.

Not sure if that one guy saying it over and over for the last 5 years even counts as a rumor.