JT Smith

Yesterday I announced the end of The Lacuna Expanse, the first massively multiplayer Perl-based web game. 

Almost 7 years ago I started working on building my second video game ever, a project that would be known as The Lacuna Expanse. Almost 6 years ago, I launched it and over the next year I evolved it as much as I could, before having to return to my other businesses. Luckily, you, the amazing community behind Lacuna Expanse picked up my mantle after I open sourced the game and continued to evolve it and make it your own. It has existed under the community’s leadership for 4 years and you have done a remarkable job.

Unfortunately, for the past 1.5 years, the game has been losing money on some months, and breaking even on others. The community has big plans to reboot it, but that has not yet come to fruition. As a business we cannot sustain the loss indefinitely, and as such have decided it’s best to make a graceful exit on our 6th anniversary.

The Lacuna Expanse will go offline as of October 1, 2016.

We are keeping Lacuna alive for thes next couple of months so that you can spend down any remaining essentia, and also so that you can gain a little closure as you complete your empires and say farewell to the friendships you’ve formed through the game over the years.

All is not lost however. All of the code for The Lacuna Expanse will remain open source, and I’m sure some people will choose to create their own local servers. In addition, several of the volunteers that have been working on The Lacuna Expanse over the past few years are continuing to make progress on a reboot of TLE under a new name. Once complete, it will have a host of new features. The name of the new game is Keno Antigen, visit the site and subscribe to be notified when it goes live.

Thank you to our community. Lacuna would have been nothing without you. We are forever thankful for your support and patronage.

JT, Kevin, John, Jamie, Tavis, and Graham
The Owners of Lacuna Expanse Corp

[From my blog.]