General Discussion

Another MMORPG joins the ranks of the fallen as Face of Mankind announced recently that their MMORPG is canceled, citing financial issues as the first reason.

We all know that you are eagerly awaiting Face of Mankind: Rebirth and we are very greatful that you stayed with us. This makes the following announcement even more sad for us.

The development of Face of Mankind: Rebirth has been canceled. There are several reasons for this decision, of which some you might understand and others you won't. The main reason is the lack of financial resources to develop the game and finish it the way we want. FoM, as many other MMORPGs today, is a game that relies heavily on visual content. For us, being only a small development studio with very limited resources, it would be nearly impossible to make the game we want it to be. You might wonder what there is to change? It runs fine and works in a way. That's right, but not the way it's supposed to. And spending so much more power and private funding into the project made not much sense anymore. There might be a time for FoM in the future, but it's just not now.

We thought about several ways to get the financing done. We tried finding a new publisher or getting investments from other sources. The best solution for the game would have been a publisher who is not solely interested in making quick money. Especially when it comes to MMO's, that have so much financial potential, the only way to go is careful development, testing and a well planned release. This doesn't necessarily have to mean a big multi-million budget. Many games are just oversized these days.

After all, this is not the end for Duplex Systems. We have tons of ideas and plans and are fully dedicated to develop those MMO's that the current market needs. In a certain way, I have to admit that FoM was oversized as well. We accomplished more than we were actually supposed to for such a small company. Many wondered if Duplex Systems was just a one-man show. Altogether this is obviously not true, but at times it was. And it made me crash down physically by the end of 2005. Even though I was able to bring the development of FoM to an end, it made me change my life and the way I run business drastically.

Beyond many other ideas, I always had the idea of a game that doesn't rely so much on graphical resources, but is more module based and generated in a way, and in the end could be done pretty well by a one or two man team. During the latest months I made this idea more concrete and developed a game concept for it. The result is Nanoverse Online, a very fresh concept in the MMO realm. At this time I don't plan to release any kind of details just yet. This is to keep our ideas safe and unique, which I hope you will understand.

Check it out here.

Poor guys... I feel for ya'll.

Best of luck finding your new projects to the whole team.

I'm not suprised, the game was pretty bad.  If someone picks it up hopefully they have talent and totally rework it.

Small shops need to think small and plan the growth of the game very carefully. 

A good example of a company NOT doing this is the one doing Darkfall. The list of content on the Darkfall webpage clearly shows the small team they have has very unrealistic goals.  Won't be surprised to see a cancelation notice from them either.

Originally posted by Stradden

The best solution for the game would have been a publisher who is not solely interested in making quick money.

Yeah, that wasn't a swipe at their current publisher, was it? lol. Sounds like there is some bitterness there. Anyhow, I beta tested FoM way back when, and I wasn't too eager to play it when I saw what it was. It seemed to not really have a nitch.

Best of luck to these guys, MMOs really are the future and now of gaming, I hope to see them pull away from this with the knowledge they need to complete a truly spectacular MMO.

Face of Mankind wasn't entirely a bad game but, as you guys are saying, it didn't plan thier goals accurratly. Duplex was a small company, very small, and it never seemed like Face of Mankind had the funding or the resources behind it to make it happen. It always seemed like it was in beta.

The worst thing I always saw was the lack of advertising. They needed to attract players but they rarely went to sites like this, IGN, Fileplanet, Gamespot, Gamespy, ect. I think thats what cost them the most in the end. Even some kind of an underground marketing campaign could have brought many to the game but there was little interest.

Lastly, a small developer cannot focus so much effort in making the graphics look great, they'll never compete with the bigger better looking companies. Smaller games like FoM need to focus on more unique content which FoM was begining to do. FoM started to create a player run political situation, however, it was only skin deep and never fully utilized or supported. In the end it simply fell apart.

Its sad to see FoM go but I hope that, in time, somebody else will succeed where they have failed.

*empathetically apologises to the FoM community*

Just as well. It would have flopped anyway in the current MMO market.

Yup.  Easy for me to say but this is MMO EIA: Evolution In Action .  With the glut of absolute crap on the market the marginal mmogs are going to fall by the wayside.

And no, Genuine innovation will not suffer.  The small hungry innovative mmo mammals will find a way to survive these turbulent economic times and emerge victorious . 

Evolve or die.

If you didn't see this one coming since about 2 years ago, you're pretty blind