James Lee 08:15 (BST)
06/08/2008

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Tony Hilliam, CEO of Australian developer Auran Games, has announced that the company was unable to find a viable business model for its MMOG Fury and will "shut the servers down in 48 hours".

Following the PC game's release in 2007, when it was launched as a subscription-based MMO, the title had been struggling to find an appropriate business model and eventually switched to a free-to-play scheme. This - according to a post made on the game's forum by Hilliam - was not enough to keep the game going and it will now be shut down.

"We have reached our time limit to find a solution that would help us keep the Fury servers open," Hilliam explained. "Sadly, no solution has been found and so we have no alternative than to shut the servers down in 48 hours."

"To the Auran team, who put their heart and soul into making Fury, thanks for your efforts. As I said many times before, we need to be much better than the competition to have a chance of succeeding. We gave it everything we had and history now judges that it still wasn't good enough," he added.

Last year, Auran was forced to layoff staff after the player-verses-player focused MMO "started off slower than expected", the company eventually fell into administration later that year.

Fury is fantasy-themed MMO that centres on deathmatch encounters between player characters. In the game players purchase armour, spells and weapons from NPCs which they then use in matches against others. Upon release Fury received poor reviews, earning it a score of 55 on Metacritic.

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