Chronicles of Elyria is Cancelled. RIP.

I feel like this one single quote from CEO, cofounder, and creative and technical director Jeromy “Caspian” Walsh pretty much sums up the entirety of Chronicles of Elyria:
When he approached investors to raise additional money for the game, they responded with: “Why are you talking with us? If you’re confident crowdfunding will sustain you, then you don’t need us. And if you’re not confident it’ll sustain you, then we’re not confident enough to invest.”

And it is with that quote that I want to let you all know, if you were one of the many backers of Chronicles of Elyria, then you’ve been scammed out of your money.
The game was announced back in May 2016, where the game had a Kickstarter goal of $900,000. It went on to garner $1.36 million through initial crowdfunding, and went on to obtain a total of almost $8 million dollars. That is almost $8 million dollars flushed down the toilet.
Now I’ll be real with you guys here: Developing an MMO takes a lot more than $900,000. It takes a lot more than $8 million dollars. MMOs are very large, incredibly complex games to make and continue development on.
Either they were being a little disingenuous with the community with what they were asking, they had private investors waiting to invest large quantities of money into the game, or.. they were just naive enough to think that that was a solid starting point for the game.

What do I think? That these “indie devs” are giving what I’ll refer to as “indie MMO devs” a bad name.
After years of development, Chronicles of Elyria had almost nothing to show. It delivered on nothing it promised.
Yet Temtem, an MMO that released into Early Access just a few months ago has more content in 2 years of development and significantly less funding than Chronicles of Elyria had over a 5 year period.
Heck, even Ashes of Creation, which has repeatedly disappointed its fans has confirmed it’s going into Alpha testing. And people have dumped on that game almost as much as they have Bless.
Now don’t get me wrong, Chronicles of Elyria seemed like a great concept in retrospect, but ultimately.. the developers behind the game clearly had no idea what they were doing, and opted to milk their community for as much as they could for as long as possible.

Shortly after the announcement was made of the game’s closure, Jeromy proceeded to take down the official Discord for the game. He stated that it was “necessary,” and he had to “remove all of the moderators.”
Furthermore, the community forums for the game, and various other features like the shop were also taken down and redirected to the landing page for the game.
This happened after he posted that, and I quote here, “We believe there’s still a future for Elyria. We’re just not sure in what shape or form it’ll take, and when it’ll be available.”
So he decides to shut all forms of communication down, but also states his intention of continuing the game, just, perhaps in a different form one day.
Why not just say you didn’t want people talking crap, didn’t want to have to moderate everything, and that eventually, once the dust has settled and this failure has passed into memory, you’ll use the assets to attempt to make a new game?

Jeromy posted one final announcement on his website, and that was pertaining to the failure and closure of the game.
In the incredibly long, drawn-out post, he went on to, instead of apologizing to fans and backers on his utter inability to deliver on what was promised, blame investors that wouldn’t give him the money he needed to keep game development moving forward.
Or, well, I say keep development moving, but what I mean is keep putting more money in their pockets to do absolutely nothing.

It sucks when a crowdfunded game fails to deliver on something they promised. This has been seen repeatedly over the development cycle of many Kickstarter funded MMOs.
It’s worse when a game shuts down. KurtzPel is on the brink of shutting down, MapleStory 2 just shut down, Bless Online– okay, actually, everyone was happy when Bless shut down. WildStar. There have been a ton.
But the worst perpetrators? The games, and developers that cancel a game before it even launches, after spending years building up hype for the game and making false promises.
But hey, that’s the market right now, and why I don’t really back any games. Not because I can’t – I’d love to back a ton of different games, but because this happens so often that I won’t.
Iunno. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer to purchase a finished product.