Ramen VR, the studio behind Zenith: The Last City, announced last month it would cease development on the VR MMORPG, citing a struggle to retain players. Now the game has received its final content update along with a bittersweet farewell to new players: a lower price.

Update (August 29th, 2024): Ramen VR has pushed its final content drop to Zenith. Detailed in a blog post, the last content update Season 4: Golden Isles has been the result of player requests sourced from community members in the Zenith Discord and customer feedback portal Feedbear.

The last season brings a smattering of new content to the free-to-play section Infinite Realms, as well as bug fixes for the top issues across both Infinite Realms and Zenith: The Last City paid DLC. Some of this includes new layouts in Infinite Realms, and new cosmetics, return of original Fast Fly, and a doubling of the limit for daily raids in The Last City.

As a farewell, Zenith: The Last City paid DLC has now dropped from its regular price of $30 to $10, available across all major VR headsets.

“We’re grateful to all the Zenitheans who have been here since the beginning, as well as anyone who chooses to pick up the game in the future. Your passion is what brings Zenith to life, and we hope you continue to make new friends and cherished memories in Zenith for the foreseeable future,” the team says,

The game will also host “nostalgic community events” following the release of Season 4, which will take place September 6th-8th. The original article detailing the development shutdown follows below:

Original Article (July 15th, 2024): The studio announced the news in a video, linked below, which describes some of the reasons behind the decision:

“Zenith has struggled with retaining players since very early on. Even though we’ve had hundreds of thousands of players, the vast majority of them stopped playing Zenith after about a month,” the company says in an FAQ.

Initially the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2019, the Steam Early Access title went on to secure $10 million Series A funding round, later landing a $35 million Series B in March 2022. Just two months before securing its Series B, the studio released Zenith on PSVR and Quest 2, putting it in the best possible position to capitalize on its ability to play cross-platform.

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In early 2024, Ramen VR revealed Zenith was running at a loss on a month-to-month basis “for the better part of a year,” which prompted the studio to release Infinite Realms, a free-to-play model, in hopes of attracting paid users.

“Despite our best efforts over the 5.5 years of development (and well before Infinite Realms launched), we weren’t able to improve retaining players. Zenith started losing money and it isn’t feasible to continue running it at a loss,” the FAQ continues.

While the studio is shutting down development, it’s not killing off the game entirely. Shards for both its paid Zenith: The Last City game and free-to-play Zenith: Infinite Realms version will be running “for the foreseeable future,” Ramen VR says. “The community will be the first to know far in advance if that changes.”

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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Marcelo Collar

    Played on Quest 2 and 3. Every update made the game look worse and run worse. =/

    • Shuozhe Nan

      Played it a lot on PCVR thanks to crossbuy. Looked almost OK there with lighting & slightly better texture.

      Felt through the world way too often since the release, game always felt just like a alpha.. and at least when I played only max level activity was some world boss, but it's zerged by a bunch of low level player also to get XP fast

  • Fabian

    It´s just too ugly. I will not play anything that looks like that.

    • LP

      Lol. Have you noticed how often this phrase appears in comments on vr games?

    • kakek

      Yeah, that's VR since it went the mobile way.
      Not that there were not plenty reasons to go that way ( First being that it was mostly a consumer choice, PCVR looked better and failed commercially. )
      But fact is it meant ugly games for a couple decades, until mobile hardware can reach the level of a computer with a GTX 970 gpu.
      I'd say it's still a couple generation away.

      • Fabian

        The Quest3 has about the raw power of a RTX 960 and with the much better optimization it can get better results than a 970 in a PC. Sure high end PCs can still make it look much better but there are pretty games on the Quest, Zenith just isn't one of them.

        • kakek

          The GPU in itself has almost the raw power of a 960, that is almost as powerfull as a 970, wich was the minimum GPU for the first wave of PCVR games. So we're already 2 "almost" away from the objective.
          But a 960 based computer would also have that GPU coupled with a more powerfull CPU, more VRam, and more ram.
          All in one, we're clearly not there yet.
          And you gotta stop with the "much better optimisation" wishfull thinking. That's not how optimisation work.
          Case and point, you're not about to see lone echo or aasgard wrath 1 on quest 3 ( though to be fair, aasgard wrath 1 did not really run well on a 970 either ).

          • Fabian

            It’s fact that consoles use the hardware more efficiant. Allmost all the ressources are used just to run the game and Software targets excactly that hardware. Quest uses fixed foveated rendering, of couse that could also be done on PC but devs dont give a shit about optimizing anything, most games even still use OpenVR instead of OpenXR whichs slows it down even more…
            I’m currently playing Lone Echo 2 on a PC with Ryzen 5800x3D + RTX3080. It runs OK with some compromises, it would be utter garbage on a GTX970 and also the Quest3 could not handle it but the does handle Red Matter 2 what is pretty game.

  • I loved what I saw of the world of the game… but the story seemed very disjointed as someone who joined late into the game's life, and the world is often so laggy it's very difficult to play with others. The flying stuff was a ton of fun though :D

  • kool

    They should have added community mods or something to keep content coming.

  • Octogod

    Kudos to them.

    Spending $45,000,000 to build Zenith shows how costly development for VR can be…and how risky it is.

    With 17 people on the end pages, let's assume each is making around $60k. With taxes and benefits, this means payroll is $50k for every two weeks. For them to break even, they need to sell about 2,000 of their DLCs every two weeks or about 50k per year. And that's just to make payroll, not profit.

    While alluring, venture capital is a ticking time bomb, often guaranteeing shutdown unless you can see exponential, perpetual growth.

    • LP

      >Spending $45,000,000 to build Zenith shows how costly development for VR can be…

      It shows how bad project management can be and what kind of junk people are willing to invest in.

  • Nothing to see here

    It would be nice if MMOs released their server software as open source (with restrictions) so that the game never really died.

  • ViRGiN

    You should cover the recent silent news that AEXLABS Vail VR is going bankrupt.

  • Traph

    The game had such promise at launch.

    Phantasy Star Online aesthetics (though very “Unity-fied”, thanks to Quest), a huge world, a great traversal system that had interesting quirks leading to emergent high skill ceiling game mechanics like fast flying (of course, these were the only major bugs fixed), VR cooking mechanics that were actually fun, an EXCELLENT OST (sorely missing in VR imo), etc

    And then launch hype died, nearly every decision made afterwards was the wrong one, and the devs seemed determined to actively drive away current players from the game while simultaneously chasing new players with half baked casual features nobody wanted.

    They had the world’s most successful VRMMO, topped all the VR sales charts, got millions in Series B funding, and proceeded to make almost every wrong choice possible. Zenith could have been VR’s Ultima or EverQuest, instead it became a cautionary tale and yet another failed VR title.

  • NL_VR

    idk if generic uninspired characters count as woke but that what i felt. all characters you create felt like som random npc… idk if they fixed/changed that later.

    • kakek

      That's not woke.
      Rightoids needs to lay off the "OmG iT's wOooOOkE !" pedal a little bit.

  • FullMetal3000

    Lol vr dead

  • Kenny

    Sad to see the only real VR MMO go.