MMO ‘disappears from the internet’

An entire MMO has been wiped from the internet after the game’s server was damaged beyond repair, according to translated reports.

It has emerged that Japanese firm Sankando had shut down its MMO, called M2, late in October to perform emergency maintenance on a set of servers.

Despite efforts by Sankando, and the game’s South Korean operator Hangame, M2’s data could not be restored.

A Japanese notice on its website ends with “a humble apology”, according to news site IgxPro.

The accident could be a foretoken to relatively unexplored issues of ownership between games publishers and customers in the digital age.

The industry is becoming less dependent on hard physical copies of product, in favour of online and in-browser games. But these titles, which customers invest their own time into, are dependent on constant maintenance from operators. Those operators, in turn, are dependent on the game being commercially viable to continue running.