Gamers were faced with mixed emotions after news that Philippine Ragnarok Online (pRO), one of the oldest eSports titles in the country, was shutting down after 12 years of operation.

Jake San Diego, Play Park’s General Manager

In an exclusive interview with Jake San Diego, General Manager of PlayPark and Level Up! games, he said that the game’s ailing performance in the face of modern video game models was the primary culprit.

“This (the closure of pRO) is an effect of the changing landscape of gaming. We never intended to close it down but evidently, what new gamers are looking for in games are different now than what it was before,” San Diego said.

“When you compare RO’s  2-D, sprite-based and pixelated visuals to the games coming out now, you can really see the difference,” San Diego added. “One of our new releases, Cabal 2, is in full HD. Its graphics would mimic your favorite console game despite being online.”

San Diego said that despite RO’s place in popular culture, the game has been failing to put up the same numbers as it had in the past. Ragnarok Online was the inspiration for local rock band Kamikazee’s hit single “Chixilog.”

“Definitely, the performance of RO was deteriorating through the years,” San Diego explained. “In these cases, most developers would like to prioritize their resources instead of continuing to operate it. It takes a lot to support a country so the developers of RO chose to service the Philippine players through the international servers based in North America.”

As part of Level Up’s announcement to close down the long-running Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), Level Up said that Philippine players will still be allowed to play and move their existing accounts to the International Ragnarok Online (iRO) servers.

Speculations

Because of the sudden announcement, many long-standing players of pRO theorized that the Level Up’s decision to shut down the 12-year old MMORPG was due to the local publishers’ inability to deliver the necessary royalty dues to Ragnarok’s Korean developer, Gravity Games.

“That is certainly not true,” San Diego clarified. “If it was, we would have been sued a long time ago. This is not the case.”

GM Aeon thanking players who availed the CnR promo (c) Rich Kid Herbert (richkidherbert.blogspot.com)

Other members of the pRO community speculated that Level Up’s Happy Hour event caused the in-game economy to break beyond repair. The Happy Hour event allowed each player to convert their in-game subscription time into in-game currency. Players who then used their in-game currency to buy Premium bundles were rewarded with rare items that were rare to obtain otherwise.

The sudden influx of rare and powerful items in the game caused many server economies to crash. From this, players theorized that Level Up simply gave up trying to fix the pRO economy and simply abandoned the game.

“Abandonment is certainly outside of the issue,” San Diego said. “We never initiated the closure of the game.”

“There are a lot of factors that could lead to the decline in the performance of game,” San Diego added. “That is ultimately the root cause of our decision. The changing landscape of gaming and the changing preference of gamers are powerful factors that come into play that is very hard to anticipate. As much as we would like to keep the game alive, if players are shifting to other forms of games, then we can only do so much as a publisher.”

Landscape changes: MMORPGs with stunning graphics (c) www.freemmostation.com

Regardless, San Diego said that the closure of pRO will not stop Level Up and its partner companies from delivering the best video game experiences for the Philippine market.

“All we can do now is to keep supporting these games and make them as easy to obtain for gamers in the country,” San Diego said.

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