mPandanda closing

From DJFang

Hey there, mPanda Pals!

It’s a very bitter announcement to make. Sadly… the Summer Festival has ended. I’ll miss it. Really guys, it’s very sad.

Thanks for reading this post.

Now, without further ado, mPandanda will cease to exist on September 28, 2019. But don’t worry, that’s 3 months away.

Wait. Stop. Don’t close the tab yet. We’ve got a lot to say. There’s a lot behind those words. Just please read this ’till the very end, we’ve put a lot of love and passion into this post, just like in any other part of mPandanda. As you have probably noticed, we ‘shifted’ festivals this year. That’s because September will be mPandanda’s final month. And over the last 11 months the team had many discussions on this subject. That’s right, we’ve known this for a while. We decided it’s now time to let you know too. We tried different plans. At the end of the day, this was the final decision.

There’s no way back.

There’s a story though and we need to share it with you.

11 months ago, we knew mPandanda that couldn’t exist, at least not in its current form, after late September 2019. We decided to see if there’s any way to avoid this. We even had the intention to create an offline version of it for everyone to enjoy. However, that was the turning point. It turned out that all the fun goes away. Yes, sure, there could be a limited amount of festivals, a collection of all mPandanda Festivals and Events (which, by the way, are around 30), there could be a limited amount of Quests, a collection of all Quests. A collection basically of everything that has existed on mPandanda. Well, almost. Two problems are to be faced in that case: one of them being technical and the other one humane, if that’s the right word to describe it. The technical problem is that it’s limited. No ongoing development. Just the same old stuff over and over again. And here comes the humane problem – what made it different was the ‘collection’ of people playing it. One cannot be made. We’re not sure how often do you realize this, but behind every Panda it’s a real person, with their own dreams, future and life. Every Panda, or person, is unique. That cannot be replicated. What makes mPandanda fun is actually you all. What makes every event different is again you all. And then it comes the team. You see, the human mind is endless, so is our imagination. Thus, technically we’re able to make unique content as long as we want to. This same thing applies to you, the players, and the infinite amount of ideas becomes even more infinite (and you can look up the infinity paradox to get a clear explanation of that).  Without you and us, making any sort of an ‘offline’ spin-off is pointless. And that’s how we decided it’s time to close our doors, forever.

You are probably already asking yourselves the question, ‘but why in the world would you want to stop working on mPandanda, you always enjoy working on it’? We surely do and that’s definitely not a lie. We enjoy spending time with you all and it’s lovely. You’re all amazing and honestly, some of us have worked on other projects previously. We abandoned them because of how amazing the concept of mPandanda and its community is. I, DJFang, personally, have never seen such a dedicated, family-like community. And I mean it. Not even speaking how many have found their true love on mPandanda, including myself (3 years in and counting, looking forward to getting married in the next few years, but that’s a topic for another day). This is because the majority of players are in their late teens, even in their early to mid 20s. And no, that’s not wrong. That’s absolutely amazing, because this shows how mature our community is and this is what makes us all one big family. You can always seek support from other players and you can always be sure that you can find it. Failed exam, family issues, we’ve seen so many fates around mPandanda, that we honestly have never imagined that we can meet people with all kinds of problems. And this is what we as a team love about it. Sadly, being this old means we need eventually to move on from this project. It is impossible to make a living with it and trust us, it’s hard to combine work, personal life and mPandanda. We don’t charge you for stuff regularly. We have small fixed donations that are just enough to cover the expenses it needs to run. We recently implemented ads to help us with our real life bills. And no, the reason we’re closing is not financial. We don’t mind the money. If we wanted to make money out of it, we’d have charged you with sky high monthly elite membership prices long ago. We never did, because that ruins all the fun. We know how terrible it was to be limited by elite membership in Pandanda back in the days and how it eventually became pay-to-play.

And we also never did, because the player base never grew back to its original size. If we added elite membership back, we needed to set the prices in a way that nobody could afford that expensive elite membership. See, with the little money we got from VIPs, we also managed to start a few ad campaigns around Twitter and Facebook and we were happy to see people coming in. A few websites also sponsored us and gave us a really good boost. But most of the people slowly never came back again. That’s because of the family-like community. Most of those newcomers from other sources didn’t really look for this, it was just an ad that appeared for them. People who naturally find out about us really need the Pandanda atmosphere and those are rare, just like gems. Yes, you are gems.

And after all this, we’re here. Whether you’ve got a lot of questions or you’re speechless, and we’ve got to clear some stuff up around the closure. We’ve been through a lot and our love towards you is what kept us going forward (It Was a Close End to an Era). We are the longest running Pandanda that has ever existed (1100 Days in March 2019). The project itself is almost 11 years old and this is an amazing age for this game. We believe that it’s better to end it all and remember forever the good memories than just milking that out and making it a terrible experience. There’s probably no other Pandanda appearing after us. We are not intending to give any piece of mPandanda away and whatever is publicly available on our servers is useless when creating the experience of Pandanda. Also, 2020 is near – Flash is already being harshly limited in July and we’re going to apply final patches to allow your fine gameplay on Chrome. If you’re on Windows, you can always download the standalone client, which is lightweight and has least lag. https://mpandanda.eu/standalone

Where to next? Why are you letting us know just now? We didn’t want to ruin your experience. This is why this notice isn’t going on the homepage and play page yet. It’s going to be seen everywhere in late August, a month earlier. That’s because closing in September doesn’t mean we haven’t got a full arsenal of festivals coming right in. July is now a tradition to be a custom amazing festival and this year is no exception.  Hard work on our side is guaranteed until the very last day. You can be sure.

Thanks for being with us throughout all those years. We don’t want to change any single moment. We have never let you down and we won’t do so until the very last second. We’ll make it all count.