Two years after the end of active development, the servers for VR MMORPG Zenith: Nexus will close on December 18. New sales of paid DLC Zenith: The Last City and in-game currency Zennies have already ended.
Zenith: The Last City was actually the original version of the game when it launched. Citing a declining player count amidst the server costs, the game pivoted to a free-to-play model in early 2024 with a new free co-op game mode called Infinite Realms. The Last City became a paid DLC, staying at its original price of $29.99. Developer Ramen VR announced the end of active development in summer 2024, but vowed to keep the servers online as long as possible. The Last City DLC would get a permanent price cut to $9.99 and the final update for the game shipped in August 2024.
Callum Self
Zenith had a lot of excitement when it was first revealed. Its initial Kickstarter raised over $200,000 and Ramen raised another $10M in funding to grow its team in preparation for launch. Zenith officially launched in Early Access in January 2022 and after notable early success, Ramen raised another $35M in funding and planned to double the size of its team to maintain and grow the game.
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Jamie Feltham
That said, Zenith’s biggest criticism, as we noted in our launch review, was a general lack of content with repetitive dungeons and quests, a low number of classes, and missing features players craved like crafting. MMORPGs in general are very difficult to pull off, requiring a lot of ongoing content to maintain one of the most dedicated and ravenous fanbases in gaming. This is a genre where people will merrily grind and go on raids with their friends for hundreds if not thousands of hours, but the content needs to be there to support that amount of playtime. Comparatively, the core campaign of the game at launch was up to forty hours, a pittance by comparison.
The Celestial Throne update in summer 2022 was the first major post-launch update, adding a slew of new quests, dungeons, armor sets, weapons and a new matchmaking system to pair players coming without a group to play with. Pets were added in late 2022, PvP gameplay was introduced in 2023, and ongoing ‘named’ updates with new content like Skyward Summit, Legends Untold, Rings of Ruin, Might and Mastery, and Ascension continued to ship.
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Harry Baker
Despite all this, the aforementioned declining player count and revenue forced Ramen into the pivot to free-to-play with Infinite Realms a season-based procedural action-adventure built around co-op gameplay and social aspects. This is also when the in-game currency, Zennies, was introduced in the hopes of bringing the game back to profitability after running at a loss for some time. Infinite Realms got four seasons ending with Golden Isles, the final content update for the game.
Henry Stockdale
That brings us to this week’s announcement of the servers shutting down. Per Ramen, sales of The Last City and Zennies ceased on October 21. The free version of Zenith will remain available to download on its available platforms until November 18. After that date, existing players will still be able to download and play the game until the servers close for good on December 18 at 10:00am PST. Ramen has said there are no plans for an offline version or community-hosted servers.
