Ramen VR, the studio behind Zenith: The Last City, announced it’s ceasing development on the VR MMORPG, citing a struggle to retain players.
The studio announced the news in a video, linked below, which describes some of the reasons behind the decision:
“Zenith has struggled with retaining players since very early on. Even though we’ve had hundreds of thousands of players, the vast majority of them stopped playing Zenith after about a month,” the company says in an FAQ.
Initially the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2019, the Steam Early Access title went on to secure $10 million Series A funding round, later landing a $35 million Series B in March 2022. Just two months before securing its Series B, the studio released Zenith on PSVR and Quest 2, putting it in the best possible position to capitalize on its ability to play cross-platform.
In early 2024, Ramen VR revealed Zenith was running at a loss on a month-to-month basis “for the better part of a year,” which prompted the studio to release Infinite Realms, a free-to-play model, in hopes of attracting paid users.
“Despite our best efforts over the 5.5 years of development (and well before Infinite Realms launched), we weren’t able to improve retaining players. Zenith started losing money and it isn’t feasible to continue running it at a loss,” the FAQ continues.
While the studio is shutting down development, it’s not killing off the game entirely. Shards for both its paid Zenith: The Last City game and free-to-play Zenith: Infinite Realms version will be running “for the foreseeable future,” Ramen VR says. “The community will be the first to know far in advance if that changes.”
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