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I’m in doubt whether I should be surprised about The Chronicles of Spellborn being shut down over at Playdom (who bought Acclaim Games) or I should be surprised about the game still running at all. It seems US players still have until the end of August to still visit the Shards and after that the game will stop.

I thought it odd that the game was kept running at all after Spellborn Works was pulled off the project; it basically robbed the game of support of any kind and I can only imagine how many bugs and problems players might have uncovered since then. Still, with a Korean development team working on it there was some hope it could be revived.

But now it seems the aftermath is coming to a close. With Frogster pulling out in Europe and Playdom shutting down the US side of operations, it seems the game has been finally laid to rest. And although it pains me to say this, it’s probably for the better.

If you didn’t catch the news elsewhere already: Spellborn Works went bankrupt. In short this means all of us who worked on the game are now without a job. But what does this mean for The Chronicles of Spellborn itself?

At the moment, it has little impact for the players. The game itself is owned by Spellborn NV, which is different from Spellborn Works. Spellborn NV actually ‘hired’ Spellborn Works to develop the game for them. All developers where in turn hired by Spellborn Works. Now that Spellborn Works is bankrupt, all the developers have been laid off.

However Spellborn NV is still in business and as such Acclaim and Frogster still have a game to run. So currently the servers are still up and you can still play the game without any problems.

Development of the MMO however has been shut down in the Netherlands and is now in the process of being moved to Frogster Asia in South-Korea. Here the game will be developed into a Free-to-Play MMO.Frogster intends to rerelease this new version somewhere in 2010.

That is all I know about the current situation. You can still play the game ‘as it is’. But at the same time it seems illogical to assume all involved parties will update the game up until the relaunch in 2010. Or at least, I wonder who would do so…

So, anyone looking for a game designer slash content writer give me call via LinkedIn or mail me at vincent at cyhwuhx.com. To the players: thank you for your support and enjoyment of the game. In the end, everything we did was for you and I speak for the entire team when I say that we are still proud at what we accomplished despite the many hardships.

Until the next Great Collapse!