Fury servers and website to close in 48 hours

Company
Auran

Kotaku AU reports that the time of Auran's Fury is coming to an end. A post on the Fury forum by Tony "Bossman" Hilliam laments that the Fury game servers and website will be up for only another 48 hours, after all attempts to keep the game afloat failed. From the forum...

We have reached our time limit to find a solution that would help us keep the Fury servers open. Sadly, no solution has been found and so we have no alternative than to shut the servers down in 48 hours.

To all those players who have enjoyed Fury and played countless battles, I am sorry that we could not find a viable business model that would allow you to continue playing. To all those naysayers and doomsdayers, we know that deep down you wanted Fury to succeed. Have fun with your parting wishes

To the Auran team, who put their heart and soul into making Fury, thanks for your efforts. As I said many times before, we need to be much better than the competition to have a chance of succeeding. We gave it everything we had and history now judges that it still wasn’t good enough.

Whilst this marks the end of the Fury chapter, who knows what the future may bring. There were many gems hidden within Fury and many lessons learned. Hopefully one day the full potential can be realized in some other form.

So for now, so long and thanks for all the fish.

P.S. We informed all stores more than a month ago to remove stock from their shelves. If you have purchased a copy of Fury in the past month, we suggest you return it to the store.
P.P.S. This website will also close down in 48 hours.
__________________
Bossman

Wishing things had turned out better.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 07/08/08 - 8:40 AMPermalink

I guess it's because nobody is really surprised Souri. Wen I mentioned this to collegues their response was pretty much that same "I thought it died ages ago?"

Sure we are sad about the Auran emplyees who lost their job but really..... they were flogging a dead horse these last few months, I'm surprised it stayed on life support as long as it did.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 07/08/08 - 2:59 PMPermalink

"To all those naysayers and doomsdayers, we know that deep down you wanted Fury to succeed." This part makes no sense to me. Don't the doomsdayers want to be able to say 'I told you so'?

Nice Hitchhiker's reference, though.

Submitted by compactjerry on Thu, 07/08/08 - 5:08 PMPermalink

Yer been coming for awhile, I think even Auran would have known deep down there was no saving this game.

In any case, an end to a very disappointing saga for Australian game development.

Submitted by souri on Thu, 07/08/08 - 5:46 PMPermalink

I've been looking back at the posts and comments relating to Fury on here, and it's just so disappointing to see it all end with pretty much little fanfare and barely a whisper like this. There was such potential albeit with a lot of risk.

I know hindsight is 20-20, but if I had the Fury budget (A$15 million ($13.2 million US)), I wouldn't go for something so niche and aimed for the hardcore gamer like Fury was. I can't remember where I saw it but there was a video of Tony Hilliam talking about the MMO market and the potential to really tap into that, but as things have shown, Fury wasn't the way in. Personally, I would've taken the Runescape route (a web-based MMORPG) looking for a much wider audience. The Auran team could've built something much prettier and better gameplay wise, but who knows, that market might be just as risky too. I think Runescape took years to get to the stage where it rakes in the millions it does every month now.

Submitted by compactjerry on Thu, 07/08/08 - 9:31 PMPermalink

Yer I agree Souri.

I know as you point out everything is easy in hindsight but personally I was always skeptical of targeting such a hardcore market. A pure pvp based 'mmo' sounds like all you do is grind xp for better gear. I guess most skeptics would say that's what you do in all mmo's but true mmo's like wow also have the social aspect and players can chop and change between both at their leisure.

Certainly the casual mmo audience would be far greater than the hardcore as you point out and probably more untapped.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 08/08/08 - 11:53 AMPermalink

I think the 'naysayers' had their fill of complaining, and most are likely enjoying new jobs now and want to forget about the whole affair. It's sort of relieving to see what turned into a rather ugly sort of saga finally come to a quiet close.

Even with hindsight, it's always distressing to see that much money get wasted on a niche product that always had very little chance of breaking even based on the size of the target demographic alone. Sure, you have to gamble big to make big bucks, but there comes a point where the cost/risk ratio is just getting silly.

My only hope is that this story doesn't make other companies even more risk-aversive.