On May 28th, via a producer letter posted to the Matrix Online official forums, MxO producer Dan "walrus" Myers announced that the game's servers would be shut down as of July 31st. This announcement was later confirmed (5/29), accompanied by a series of answered questions, by MxO forum administrator Raijinn.
Source: MxO Official Forums [ more info ]

My various inboxes were inundated with this news on the 29th. But of course, all of this went down the day before I left for Massachusetts. There wasn't enough time for me to work it into the site before I left.

Now... I feel a little bad for the lack of kindness I show at MxO's demise. But, I never played the game and the number of requests I got to do more MxO comics rests squarely at zero. I just don't have any reason to draft a whispered nicety or solemn homage. And I guess that leaves a callous, semi-relevant barb.

Honestly it feels a bit like kicking someone when they're down. But hey, you've seen the movie. When did that ever stop Neo?

I'm not surprised by the downfall of MxO, I may be mistaken but it seems that to do a MMo on an already established IP is very hard to make work. WoW being an exception ( it is still to early to say for Warhammer online).

welcome back man

and i would not say its too early to judge warhammer....the game is circling the zapper already...

the game had such high potential...

To be honest, I'm not at all surprised. One of the first things they did with MxO was kill off Morpheus. That's not exactly smart to kill off one of the most popular characters right at the beginning. They may have overestimated the popularity of the matrix.

If they got rid of their negative shouting man in the beginning perhaps Warhammer would have been taken a bit more seriously.

Wonder what will happen to the MxO peoples, would be nice if it could be sold on for them, on a free advertising server place.

I honestly don't see how it lasted this long. I was in the early closed beta and hated even logging to do beta assignments, not to mention logging after release. I just couldn't see how they would be able to keep the story going.

I played it I believe 3 times, leveled to about 20... Kinda enjoyed it when it did work, but the sound was glitchy, the animations were cool, but not fluid, and the travel was kind of annoying...

HOWEVER... I did like the concept... Course helps I played it thru my station pass, so didn't cost me anything...

Sad to see it go, as they only had 3 servers to begin with, but when I was in, I ALWAYS saw a ton of people on... WAY more than I see in vanguard... Which I hope is not next...

ANYWAYS...

Sad to see another one bite it...

Well that was something that I saw coming miles away... I did never like that mmo, especially du to the fact that they conned me into paying for a subscription when trying their one month trial..

Its always sad to see an MMO bite the dust, although not surprising that it was MXO. It was an interesting IP, but ultimately I don't think it was that good in practice.

In a side note, it's interesting how Shadowbane continues to live on. I wonder if July will truly see them pulling the plug or if it will get another stay.

I had thought this game was done years ago, then decided for kicks to check and saw they still had their site up and news going. Not really a shocker that in the end it got zapped.

Also, as for Warhammer, I don't really think it is 'flying around the zapper'. It has a few hundred thousand subscribers, and while it is of course no where near the number of WoW subscribers, $14.99 (US) times say 300,000 is almost 4.5 million a month in 'profit'. That's a considerable chunk of change which I am sure covers the salaries of the dev team, GMs, support staff, server maintenance, ISP costs, etc. for a year in one month. And if not, it certainly would over a year.

It is the rare bird that flies anywhere near the zapper before being on the market for 5+ years I would say, especially if the game is based off of some sort of IP and not a completely new experience.