VR's largest MMORPG gets cheaper and receives final content update
UPDATEAugust 28, 2024:
Zenith: Nexus has received its final content update as promised. Season 4: Golden Isles brings new content to Infinite Realms and numerous quality of lige improvements to Zenith: The Last City.
The price of Zenith: The Last City was reduced from $30 to $10.
Check out the official blog for more information.
The studio behind the largest VR MMORPG, Zenith, is discontinuing development and moving on to a new project.
Ramen VR founders Andy Tsen and Lauren Frazier announce in a YouTube video that development of Zenith will soon be ceased.
"Zenith has struggled with retaining players since very early on. Even though we’ve had hundreds of thousands of players, the vast majority of them stopped playing Zenith after about a month," the studio wrote in an FAQ. Despite our best efforts over the 5.5 years of development (and well before Infinite Realms launched), we weren’t able to improve retaining players. Zenith started losing money and it isn’t feasible to continue running it at a loss."
Season 4 for Infinite Realms is scheduled for August, along with a series of bug fixes for Infinite Realms and The Last City. After that, the game will receive no new content, seasons, or features, and only urgent bug fixes.
The servers will remain in operation "for the foreseeable future".
"We don’t have a scheduled end date for shards, but we’ll let players know far in advance. The costs of maintaining servers are pretty significant, but we want to make sure the players who love Zenith have plenty of time left to enjoy it," the FAQ states. Player support will be available until the end of September 2024.
The studio will now turn its attention to a new, yet-to-be-announced project. More details are said to be coming soon.
The rise and fall of Zenith
The VR MMORPG successfully launched in early 2022 under the name Zenith: The Last City, so much so, that the studio was able to raise $35 million in investment capital shortly thereafter.
By 2023, Ramen VR ran into financial trouble because, despite regular content updates, more players were abandoning the game than were purchasing it.
In early 2024, the studio released a standalone free-to-play mode, Zenith: Infinite Realms, while Zenith: The Last City became a paid DLC. The overall name of the game became Zenith: Nexus.
According to the founders, this change also did not bring the success they had hoped for, so the studio decided to stop development and try something new.
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