By now, you've probably heard the news regarding The Matrix Online, Sony Online Entertainment, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, and DC Comics. If you haven't, here's the deal: SOE and WBIE are jointly working on an MMO in which characters from The Matrix, The Superfriends, and Looney Toons will find themselves unlikely allies in an early '90s, West Coast-style "urban" environment, and forced to race in oversized go-karts while fighting terrorists within more than 20 licensed real-world NFL stadiums. Just kidding. Warner Bros. Interactive has actually decided to drop The Matrix Online, and SOE has picked it up. Lots of talented people lost their jobs in the process, and from out of nowhere, a DC Comics MMO has materialized. I'm serious this time.

Regardless of whether or not you're a fan of the studio in question, it always sucks to see one go. Besides the fact that a whole lot of blood and sweat goes into making one of these games, it just bodes poorly when one of them doesn't perform as well as it could. It can breed hesitation in regards to expanding the market, and even worse, limit the scope of future projects. Very few publishers will be interested in pursuing novel ideas -- especially costly ones, as these tend to be -- when they've been proven to perform poorly when brought to the market.

I guess I'm a bit surprised that Matrix Online hasn't done better. Sure, the license isn't quite in vogue anymore, but I always had a sneaking suspicion that its fanbase was a bit more substantial than what the game's numbers insinuate. The figure floating around is 40,000 units moved at retail. How many of these ultimately translated into active subscription remains a mystery, unfortunately, but in the grand scheme of things, the number can't be too grand, especially for a game with such a huge license. Warner Bros. clearly had high hopes for this game, so it becomes clearer and clearer why it's decided to unload it.

Morpheus' pleather overcoat: only $45 US on Station Exchange!

SOE obviously sees the potential that the game has, if not for the strength of the license, then for the novel approach that Monolith taken with it in regards to content updates. At this point, pretty much every MMO on the market boasts having "regular live events," but in truth, none of them deliver on these as meaningfully as Monolith did with MxO. Far from treating them as an afterthought (which, regrettably, is the norm for games like this), MxO used them to leverage what Monolith wisely believed to be its primary strength: the Matrix mythos. Warner Bros. wasn't lying when it mentioned that the trilogy's narrative would continue to unfold in MxO. All sorts of monumental things (in the series' context, anyway) have already happened, including the unceremonious killing-off of the much-beloved Morpheus. In short, MxO's live events have a way of galvanizing the playerbase that I've yet to see in any other game. Combine that with some EQII-style TLC, and SOE might just have a really fresh game on its hands.