Ramen VR, the studio behind Zenith: The Last City, announced last month it would cease development on the VR MMORPG, citing a struggle to retain players. Now the game has received its final content update along with a bittersweet farewell to new players: a lower price.
Update (August 29th, 2024): Ramen VR has pushed its final content drop to Zenith. Detailed in a blog post, the last content update Season 4: Golden Isles has been the result of player requests sourced from community members in the Zenith Discord and customer feedback portal Feedbear.
The last season brings a smattering of new content to the free-to-play section Infinite Realms, as well as bug fixes for the top issues across both Infinite Realms and Zenith: The Last City paid DLC. Some of this includes new layouts in Infinite Realms, and new cosmetics, return of original Fast Fly, and a doubling of the limit for daily raids in The Last City.
As a farewell, Zenith: The Last City paid DLC has now dropped from its regular price of $30 to $10, available across all major VR headsets.
“We’re grateful to all the Zenitheans who have been here since the beginning, as well as anyone who chooses to pick up the game in the future. Your passion is what brings Zenith to life, and we hope you continue to make new friends and cherished memories in Zenith for the foreseeable future,” the team says,
The game will also host “nostalgic community events” following the release of Season 4, which will take place September 6th-8th. The original article detailing the development shutdown follows below:
Original Article (July 15th, 2024): 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.
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.”