Closure
Final "Yavn Speaks" Newsletter
April 7, 2008
Don't miss this important message from Yavn about the future of VMK.
I hope you're enjoying our Topsy Turvy ToonTown month. We've got more cool events on the way including chances to win 14-day unlimited trial memberships to ToonTown Online!
Topsy Turvy ToonTown month won't last forever – so get to building some Topsy Turvy Guest Rooms, Game Rooms and Quests!
Speaking of things lasting forever, recently several of you have been asking about how much longer VMK will last. Well today I have some news about our future.
As many of you know, Virtual Magic Kingdom was created and launched back in 2005 as part of the Disneyland 50th Anniversary Celebration. VMK exceeded expectations in terms of performance, and as a result we extended the promotion (that is, VMK, the game) well beyond the 50th Celebration.
Eventually though, all promotions must come to an end, so I'm announcing today that on May 21, 2008, VMK will open our virtual gates for the last time. You read that right: VMK was never intended to last forever we'll close the game for good at the end of day on May 21st, 2008.
This is not an April Fool's joke.
Now we understand this news may be upsetting to you but let me explain. Again, VMK was launched as part of Disneyland's 50th Celebration in 2005 and the game has lived well beyond the originally intended time it was planned to run.
Over time you've seen our in-Park presence and other parts of VMK go away. You may remember our V.I.P Tours at Disneyland and Walt Disney World, or our in-Park Quest. We didn't stop doing those things because we don't love the game or our Guests, but because the time to run those promotions ended.
At Disney we're still committed to building communities and online virtual worlds and we're looking forward to providing you the opportunity to enjoy other exciting new experiences.
Don't look at VMK ending as a bad thing think of it as a new beginning, a chance to explore something fresh and new! Think of it like school: You don't want to leave your old friends, but still, the time has come to graduate and move onto another great adventure.
In the time since we've launched VMK, we've seen many players come and go, and we're hoping you will graduate from VMK too in particular, to games like Pirates of the Caribbean Online, Disney's ToonTown Online, Club Penguin and the upcoming Fairies and Cars online virtual worlds. We think you'll find you enjoy those just as much as VMK – if not more.
Live the Legend! Play Pirates of the Caribbean Online!
In the meantime, VMK will run like it always has, with great events and new items every week until we close we might even fit in one or two more surprises along the way (of the virtual item kind). So what's going to happen to the VMK Staff when VMK closes? Well, we're all moving onto other projects here at Disney and positively looking ahead to the future. Me and a few other team members have already moved to other projects (but are still making sure VMK is running smoothly until it closes).
I know that this is sad news for you, but we're all thankful we've had the opportunity to enjoy the game for as long as we did. Just know there are even cooler things on the horizon ahead, for you as players and for us as game creators. So as my good friend Captain Jack Sparrow would say... "Bring me that horizon!" -Yavn
Questions? We've prepared this Q&A:
Why is this happening? Why are you closing Virtual Magic Kingdom?
As Yavn mentioned in the Newsletter, VMK was created and launched as part of a promotion to celebrate Disneyland's 50th Anniversary. The game/promotion has ran well beyond the original time it was intended to.
When is the last time I can play?
The game will close at 10:00PM PST, Wednesday, May 21st, 2008.
Will I still be able to buy cards and pins in the Parks?
Yes, you can still buy VMK Cards and Pins at Disneyland and Walt Disney World Parks while supplies last but after May 21st, 2008 the codes will no longer work in the game.
What will happen to the game and the website?
The website will remain up for a few weeks to let people know what has happened, but you will not be able to log into the game after May 21th, 2008.
What will happen to all my virtual stuff in VMK?
Since the virtual items live only in VMK, you won't be able to access your VMK items or take them with you to another Disney Online Virtual World.
The End of VMK
Joe Pishgar, Community Manager for VMK (Sulake)
June 3rd, 2008 link
As promised, I’m going to try to write a little bit about the closing of VMK.
Firstly, it came as quite a surprise. The game had been doing quite well, and was in what I’d like to characterize as the “throes of new growth”.
Actually, I’m going to suddenly diverge for a moment here to mention the unique flavor of VMK. As far as social spaces go, it was specifically unique. Canned dictionary-based chat lead to a seperate language. I glove my duh.duh as “I love my daddy.” Language is the first icon of culture, and VMK’s culture took great pains for me to originally become inducted into.
The environment of VMK was Disney, but a softly dilluted Disney with alternate non-brand characters like the Yeti and Esmeralda the fortune teller. But, despite this dillution, the environment in which the players played was kept almost diabetically sweet through persistent high quality content updates. New clothing, items, rooms, contests, events - grand things and special attentions that paying subscribers of most MMOs would give their thumbs for were commonplace and free.
The players themselves coordinated events and room hosting, playing games in the freeform social space provided them in exchange for their increased brand awareness. Tweens, mostly female, occupied the bulk of the demographic. Coupled with this, I presided as Community Manager over the most professional ace team of Moderators and event Hosts I have ever known of. With pedigrees in AOL’s Community Leader program, the mods I had the pleasure of directing I have never witnessed before in any other MMO. And to boot, the staff itself was huge!
Due to COPPA regulations regarding kids in online spaces, moderation had to remain constant, and so my staff was a sizable 30+. One of the major aspects of sadness I have about the game’s closure is that I will likely never again see assembled a team of moderators as freaking awesome as these guys were. The majority have gone on to other projects, but I aspire to hire them back again in my next mod team if I possibly can.
So, we were talking about VMK’s unique “flavor”. Ever see that movie from the 80’s, Legend with Tom Cruise, before he went all schitzo? You know the one, with Tim Curry as the big red, black horned Satan creature. In it, there’s a few scenes with a unicorn running and bucking through a forest with insistent rays of sunshine blasting down in between windswept leaves. There’s a reverb synth riff playing by Tangerine Dream in stopping, high breathless pace over piano. It’s a dirty, brilliant light filled with dust and earth and good. That’s probably the most accurate way I can describe the flavor of VMK.
Unexpected. It came out of the blue. I won’t describe the circumstances that lead up to Disney’s decision to close the game - I can’t. The description given publically that it was time to end the promotion was the one I received myself. I didn’t question it, no reason to. Decisions like that one are large and involve so many more moving parts and people and discussions and paperwork than can be imagined, and it is not Community’s job to question why, but to tow the line and state the facts.
At some point after the announcement, it became my role to gently guide a quarter-million kids into the virtual netherworld quietly, calmly and cooly. Pfft, Grey, you exaggerate, you dramatic bastage! Yeah, I do, a little, but the tears were freaking real. Here these kids, my kids were, with the rug pulled out from under them. The Destruction of a Virtual World. It hasn’t happened in recent memory. Not on this scale.
There weren’t any articles I could read, no post-mortems about what went wrong, how things progressed towards the event horizon of shutdown of another MMO or virtual world of this size. Uncharted territory in a major way, and this with a demographic statistically inclined towards self-violence. Business as usual was the byline up to the end. There are lessons, dark lessons that can be learned from watching a thing die. I watched while the pillars of community atrophied and collapsed after the announcement, and witnessed emotionally charged emergent behavior on the part of the players that stuck around to the final hour.
I was quite a bit more behind the scenes in this role that I have been before, and I was glad of it at the end. After all community initiatives were cancelled, I reset the priority for my staff and myself to be the continued survival of the VMK community in some form or another. Alliances with third party forums, transitional tokens for alternate games, a loosening of identifiable information restrictions so that players could exchange character names in other games or social spaces… for many of these players who had called VMK home for years and found in it their own support mechanism, community had to persist.
There were some battles that needed fighting right up until the very end, and I gave it my all to see that the game ended on a respectable note and gave closure to its little citizens. I have a few more gray hairs for some of those fights, but they needed to be fought and I am thankful for the outcome.
The closing itself was spun like a graduation, and I visited as many rooms as I could. The “rare” mod no one had seen before. I offered consolation, and I went personally to the pillars of community that remained - those brave souls in it until they flip the switch for the last time. (Of which I am still one in Ultima Online).
There was this little girl in VMK, posted about in a few articles about the closing. Madison Reed has Spinal Muscular Atrophy and, well, suffers from the effects of this malady in a wheelchair. She defied the odds when she did not die after turning 2 years old. She is now 11 years old and plays… played VMK as a little princess in a pink dress. She loved VMK because she could dance and have fun parties with her friends and she didn’t even have to worry about germs.
She was in-game on the final day, decorating her castle suite room in the final hours. I stopped by and introduced myself. I spoke to her and answered her questions. We posed for a picture so she could remember the day. Things were coming to a wrap and I had to get going. Without warning, she approached my avatar in-game and thanked me with a hug. And then she danced. I hit the dance emote button and joined her in her dance. And for awhile, we just danced.
I met the end dancing, on the far right of a straight line of players who gathered unbidden to the statue of Walt and his pal Mickey in the Castle Forecourt. That’s how VMK ended. That said, I’d love to go into details about the lessons learned, but after mentally rehashing the closing I’m running on empty. Perhaps another time.
A Look Back at 2008, Excerpt
Joe Pishgar, Community Manager for VMK (Sulake)
December 24, 2008 link
Career-wise, this was a weird year. It started decently enough, with the continuance of the historically troubling doubling of my salary couched in a fleeting disaster. My first year working remotely, and I am truly spoiled to the concept. I have never gotten more work done in a day’s time than in the earlier months this year in VMK. With no interoffice politics, I can get crazy amounts of work done. No stupid producers leaning in my office doorway talking mindlessly about patching and the latest problems with the publisher. If it’s important, it goes in a bloody e-mail and I action it. I’m tempted to keep the community growth percentages I achieved in VMK a secret, as there’s only a handful of other remote-style CM/Director level types in the industry now. Hah! That would SO TOTALLY explain Eve Online! Holy crap!
Moving on though, closing that damned game was… eh. Traumatizing? It was emotional, that’s for sure. I’m just glad I was able to help most of my employees find work before the end. And I’m also pleased that the community continues to survive in some fashion in another virtual world. That really makes it worthwhile to me, that promise of continuance. I chalk the whole experience up to providence. The past few months have been weird. Moments of boredom in the limbo of being on retainer punctuated by spurts of community creation. Working on the genetic code of a new international online community is thrilling, but the continued unsatisfied anticipation is SO damned anticlimactic. Previously, I’ve only been the symphony conductor, stabbing my wand this way and that to build crescendo and pace the rhythm, but now I’m writing the effin’ sheet music. It’s slow going, but I expect the reward will be intoxicating.
Disney Guest Email Response
April 10, 2008 link
Subject: Re: WDIG Guest Mail
From: [email protected]
Thank you for contacting The Walt Disney Company and VMK.
We have received an outpouring of feedback regarding our decision to close VMK. We are overwhelmed by the responses and enthusiasm of our guests, but unfortunately our decision to eventually close VMK is set. We have explored many different options, including a pay to play model but have decided to focus more of our time on our new virtual worlds coming soon, which we are sure that you will love as much as VMK.
Deciding to close VMK was a very difficult decision for us because we loved creating VMK just as much as you loved playing it. But in a company that encourages innovation and creativity we have decided to "keep moving forward" and exploring where the future takes as, because in the words of Walt Disney, "We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths."
Thank you for being part of this journey with us, and we hope we continue to see you at Disney.com enjoying what we imagine next!
Sincerely,
Your friends at VMK
