What about the player population? Some readers will choose to believe that the game is being canceled because it's "dying."

Populations have stayed pretty steady for a long time now. In fact, we recently merged a bunch of servers to help the prime-time population. But gosh, the game's been running for a long time now, and it's been a great run. We're glad to have done it. There are going to be a lot of fans that are going to say, hey can't you give us the source code, or can't we run a server, and the answer is going to be, I'm sorry -- we have to decline that. It's just not possible.

PC WELCOME BACK DETAILS

We want to ensure that your experience is as positive as possible as you re-enter our games. To show our gratitude for your patience and support, Sony Online Entertainment is offering a Welcome Back Program, the details of which are outlined below.

Firstly, as a Station Account holder in good standing, you will receive 45 days of game time (30 days plus 1 day for each day of the outage) added to your Station Account. This game time applies to any game you have currently or previously activated on your Station Account.

For those customers on an active paying plan, this time has been added to the end of your current billing cycle. For all other customers, your time begins upon your first login to each of the relevant games. Customers must login by 11:59 pm PST August 31, 2011 to claim the game time.

lol I have 5 accounts with the 45 days pending but do I want to go through the trouble of installing and patching SWG?

well patching now then I guess I'll see if Chilastra is still alive.

My house is still there?!?!

Here’s what I would have done differently. I would have made sure the ground and space games were launched all at once. I would have given the game another year to develop and really polish it quite a bit. I think we created one of the most unique and amazing games ever created in the MMO space. It is the sandbox game. Nothing else even comes close to what we did there. I would have really taken our time and polished combat right so we never had to do the NGE

Upset Star Wars Galaxies fans are threatening to sue Sony for not listening to their pleas of protest about the game's December shut down.

What do you do when the hobby that occupied all of your time is taken away? You fire up a good ole’ class-action lawsuit, of course. A group of Star Wars Galaxies players, upset about the closure of the eight year-old MMORPG are claiming that Sony is silencing their many cries out for help on the SWG forum, deleting and locking posts that demand the game become free-to-play or stay open somehow. Due to the impending launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, Sony and LucasArts have decided to shut the aging online RPG down.

“Dear Subscribers, We’ve decided to kill your kitten,” said one frustrated fan on the game’s Facebook page. “But Can we interest you in a Puppy, A Gerbil, a Parrot, And a Llama, all for one low subscription price?”

More than 2,500 players have signed a petition demanding that Sony keep Star Wars Galaxies up and running as a free-to-play game, reports VentureBeat. They claim that the game should be modified to be run off of microtransactions, or the sale of virtual goods within the game. On top of that, they’d like Sony to consolidate players onto a smaller number of servers and allow more character transfers to keep things running. Sadly, what they don’t realize is that converting a subscription-based MMORPG to a completely new style of play isn’t a switch Sony can pull. It would take months of effort and dozens of developers, all for a game that is essentially being replaced.

With a subscriber base that never breached 1,000,000 and a dwindling player base in the thousands, it’s difficult to see Star Wars Galaxies as more than a failure, even by pre-World of Warcraft standards, where few games exceeded 1-2 million subscribers. In today’s market, WoW is the new standard and even it is having some problems. Having said that, we do acknowledge some very great ideas that SWG boldly attempted to bring to the RPG world, including entirely human-made cities and houses, vehicles, giant cities, character customizations, and careers in crafting and smuggling that didn’t all involve doing nothing but killing animals over and over every day. Though many of these efforts fell short of their goals, they were fun nonetheless.

Sony, for its part, hasn’t handled the situation well. It’s moderators have been fighting the grieving players, who are obviously in denial of their favorite game’s upcoming death, on the game’s official help forums, locking and moving topics without officially commenting on the small uprising. Obviously it has not learn that fear of losing their game has led to anger from fans and anger could lead to hatred and hatred can only lead to the dark side.

Do you think players will get anywhere by suing Sony for shutting down the game?