WildStar developer Carbine Studios to close

Carbine Studios is going to close. This also means that his mmorpg WildStar will be taken offline. Parent company and developer NCsoft started the closing process yesterday.

According to Kotaku, the team at Carbine Studios heard the news in a meeting. One of the employees told the website that the decommissioning was already underway. At least two of the studio’s new projects were discontinued by NCsoft. In addition, in 2016, almost half of the team had to leave the studio due to budget cuts. Fifty more team members will be fired in the run-up to the closure.

Preparations to shut down WildStar have already begun. Expenses from July 1, 2018 will be returned to players until the payment system is closed. In addition, NCsoft is in the process of designating teams that will take the game off the air. It is not yet known when the closure will be fully completed, for both Carbine Studios and WildStar.

Carbine Studios was founded in 2005 by former members of the World of Warcraft team. Two years later, the studio was bought by NCsoft, the developer of Guild Wars 2 and Lineage. In June 2014, WildStar was released, a mmorpg that had to compete with World of Warcraft. The game used a similar monthly subscription until it got a free-to-play model a year later. The game came to Steam in 2016. The peak in popularity was in June of that year, with 5,000 players. Since then, the number of simultaneous players has remained almost constant below a thousand.