Fury developer Auran has closed its doors in the wake of yesterday's unveiling of a new free-download, free-play model for its PvP-focussed MMO.
"The Directors of Auran Developments, the company that employs all the Auran staff, have today called in a Voluntary Administrator (like Chapter 11 in the US). All the staff were dismissed today. Despite earlier reports, staff will be paid for all their work to date, their annual leave entitlements, redundancy payments and long service leave", the developer has said in an official statement.
It continued, "With Fury, we built up a team to make a world beating game and sadly we have not reached our goals - yet. Our performance to date has meant we could no longer fund the 70 strong dev team.
"However, Fury: Age of the Chosen will be launched as planned Friday 8pm GMT. We have put together a small but committed team to continue developing Fury on an ongoing basis. This core team, as we announced last week, are a passionate group of people committed to making Fury a success.
"We will be releasing bug fixes, content and feature updates on a regular basis and in fact they will be more frequent with our new agile team.
"I believe that once people hear about F:AotC and the new Free to Play business model, we'll start building up the player numbers and revenues that will make the game successful", Tony Hilliam, now former CEO of Auran, has added.
They really really made a mess of it, i signed up for the beta, but then it was only going to be for a weekend( who downloads several gigs of an mmorpg game just o get to try it for the weekend??? ), then they had a free weekend, people need to play mmo's for at least a few weeks free to get into it( not all of us can play every evening and only have a few hours free time to play in a week ) Its really unfortunate, i think they would have done so much better getting everyone hooked then charge
It's sad to see a developer close as in the end it limits our choice as consumers. We are left with the EAs and the Blizzards who churn out up dates of last years games. No innovation and growth. Fury though was not a good game. I also took part in the beta and found the game to be poor even when I could get access. I will download the free client though as I am a 2 faced B****** . Still a sad day for choice
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