Ramen VR, the studio behind Zenith: The Last City, announced it’s ceasing development on the VR MMORPG, citing a struggle to retain players.

The studio announced the news in a video, linked below, which describes some of the reasons behind the decision:

“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 company says in an FAQ.

Initially the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2019, the Steam Early Access title went on to secure $10 million Series A funding round, later landing a $35 million Series B in March 2022. Just two months before securing its Series B, the studio released Zenith on PSVR and Quest 2, putting it in the best possible position to capitalize on its ability to play cross-platform.

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In early 2024, Ramen VR revealed Zenith was running at a loss on a month-to-month basis “for the better part of a year,” which prompted the studio to release Infinite Realms, a free-to-play model, in hopes of attracting paid users.

“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,” the FAQ continues.

While the studio is shutting down development, it’s not killing off the game entirely. Shards for both its paid Zenith: The Last City game and free-to-play Zenith: Infinite Realms version will be running “for the foreseeable future,” Ramen VR says. “The community will be the first to know far in advance if that changes.”

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Marcelo Collar

    Played on Quest 2 and 3. Every update made the game look worse and run worse. =/

    • Shuozhe Nan

      Played it a lot on PCVR thanks to crossbuy. Looked almost OK there with lighting & slightly better texture.

      Felt through the world way too often since the release, game always felt just like a alpha.. and at least when I played only max level activity was some world boss, but it's zerged by a bunch of low level player also to get XP fast

  • Fabian

    It´s just too ugly. I will not play anything that looks like that.

  • I loved what I saw of the world of the game… but the story seemed very disjointed as someone who joined late into the game's life, and the world is often so laggy it's very difficult to play with others. The flying stuff was a ton of fun though :D

  • kool

    They should have added community mods or something to keep content coming.

  • Octogod

    Kudos to them.

    Spending $45,000,000 to build Zenith shows how costly development for VR can be…and how risky it is.

    With 17 people on the end pages, let's assume each is making around $60k. With taxes and benefits, this means payroll is $50k for every two weeks. For them to break even, they need to sell about 2,000 of their DLCs every two weeks or about 50k per year. And that's just to make payroll, not profit.

    While alluring, venture capital is a ticking time bomb, often guaranteeing shutdown unless you can see exponential, perpetual growth.