As live service games struggle, a 27-year-old MMO just got a new update

While the modern streaming service boom has led to many games shutting down after just a few months, there are some online titles that have been around for decades.

A notable example is Tibia, a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game that was originally released in 1997. 27 years later, developer Cipsoft is still rolling out updates to the title, with the latest being a summer update this month .

Despite its age, Tibia isn’t a game most people are likely to have heard of, and yet it’s part of a surprisingly large group of MMOs that are still going strong long after the more high-profile titles. have been closed by their publishers.

In the summer update, Cipsoft has added new candy-themed areas within Candia to explore, along with new monsters, items and equipment. There’s also a wave-based survival arena titled The Soulpit, which gives players special rewards for making it to the end.

There are even a bunch of quality-of-life updates, including the ability to quickly loot all nearby corpses and improvements to the in-game market interface. All the kinds of updates you’d expect months after launch, not 27 years later.

According to MMO tracker website Populations, Tibia is estimated to have had 8,350 players per day this month – which is a very healthy amount considering it’s been out for nearly three decades.

That’s well below genre king World Of Warcraft’s estimated total of 288,745 players, but it’s far more than the live streaming service Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, which only came out this year and yet had a weak 24 hour high of 627 players. this week.

Tibia is far from the first MMO. One of the earliest examples is the text-based GemStone series produced by Simutronics in 1988, but 1991’s Neverwinter Nights is widely credited as the first with actual graphics and ran from 1991 to 1997 (there were many subsequent games with the same name).

As for the oldest MMO still receiving updates today, that title probably goes to Meridian 59. Originally released in 1996 as a monthly subscription service, the title was later made available as open source software in 2012, directed by some of the original developers. It last received a patch in June 2024 and is currently available for free on Steam.

Ultima Online is also up there, in terms of the longest running title in the genre. Originally released in 1997, the game is still being updated with new servers and rulesets, the latest being Ultima Online: New Legacy, which is scheduled for release in September of this year.

Although the genre has many predecessors, including the 1978 MUD, the modern concept of a continuous online world with dozens or hundreds of players at once was popularized by 1999’s EverQuest and later, World Of Warcraft and EVE Online in the early 2000s.