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

While the modern boom in live services has led to many games being discontinued after just months, there are some online titles that have been around for decades.

One notable example is Tibia, a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) originally released in 1997. 27 years later, developer Cipsoft is still releasing updates for the title, with the latest being this month’s summer update.

Despite its age, Tibia isn’t a game most people are likely to have heard of, yet it’s part of a surprisingly large group of MMOs that are still going strong long after their publishers have shut down their higher profile titles.

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

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

According to tracking site MMO Populations, Tibia had an estimated 8,350 daily players this month — a very healthy number 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 a lot more than the live service game Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, which only came out this year and still had a weak 24-hour peak 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 several subsequent games of the same name).

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

Ultima Online is also up there for the longest running title in the genre. Originally released in 1997, the game continues to be updated with new servers and rulesets, the latest being Ultima Online: New Legacy, due out this September.

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