About Garriott and space: he's not a poor guy for one. I wonder how much money he's made since he started doing games? Plus got his (former) position at NCSoft? Two, how do you know he's not in quite a bit of debt because of that little excursion?

I don't think I've heard from any source at any point that Tabula Rasa wasn't a money pit for NCSoft. Add in the low subscriber base, which according to some fans was enough to break even (I'll call that the best case scenario) at most? Has anyone considered NCSoft looked into alternative revenue models for TR and found the various scenarios to be lacking/not viable?

I wonder if there's a good bit of proprietary/licensed stuff in TR preventing them from going the open source route. But at the same time, they'd be giving away something they spent a lot of money on for free that could make a competing game/service later on. I really don't see any tangible rewards/incentives for them for doing that. Lineage I would make more sense as an OS candidate than TR (except, you know, L1 is profitable).

I think if NCSoft does anything with TR, it'll be after the game is shut down. Maybe scaling it down, changing things around, and making it into an offline product would work. Maybe someone will buy it later on. No telling. But if the game is a constant drain on them financially, taking money and staffing that could be better used elsewhere (and profitably), I can completely understand.

This is the downside to "software as a service," and in all honesty, is good to remind us that these games won't be around forever. I liked TR, and will miss it certainly, but I hope this will prompt players and companies to wonder about these things a bit more.