This is now officially the eighth Massive Update, and I’ve been taking pains to do this ’smarter’. As you can imagine, putting that thing together is a bit time consuming. Doing it all in one day is … challenging. So! Now going to be doing this over the course of the week so I don’t, you know, hate it.

This week’s Big Story is just darn depressing.

At a time when we’re seeing the sun rise on so many new and interesting massively multiplayer games, it’s sad to report there will be one less out there soon. NCSoft has announced that they will be closing down Auto Assault as of September 1st of this year. The official announcement was terse, saying that players would be compensated and the service will be going offline at midnight on August 31st.

Warcry got a few more details out of the company:

“After a while it gets to the point where the return we’re getting on what we’re putting into it is just not matching up,” NCSoft Director of Public Relations David Swofford told WarCry after the news hit. “We just didn’t have that many people in the service.” According to Swofford, NCSoft owns the Auto Assault intellectual property. If that does not change before September 1st, there is no legal way that the game can continue on. However, hope may not be gone.

Except there isn’t really any hope. Warcry has a chat with Scott Brown, who says NetDevil isn’t going to do anything with the product. So … that’s pretty much all she wrote.

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