Things Are not going well in the land of NCSoft. It was recently announced that Tabula Rasa is shutting down in February 2009. For fans of the game this is not good news and for NCSoft this is yet another blow to their model of building interesting, yet ultimately niche games in the MMO RPG space. Years ago when this game was first announced I thought it looked very interesting, but by the time it finally launched it looked like yet another MMO. Now here we are not too much later in the game is already being handed an early death.

As a gamer I have mixed feelings about the situation. On one hand I like seeing innovation and interesting ideas being pushed out, especially in the RPG space. However, it seems that the only thing that works in MMO RPG are World of Warcraft clones. Of course, you could argue that World of Warcraft sells was really just an ever quest clone done much better. On the other hand, everything I read said that this game is mediocre. What we all should take away from this is that mediocre games don’t sell. Developers would do well to stop making mediocre games and trying to sell them to the gaming public. It just doesn’t work.