**The reason I put two dates is because for most of us, the game "died" in 2008, with the major changed HL made. And for others, the game didn't die at all.**

Just logged in and this is what's been posted:

   Dear Horseland Players,

I'm writing to you with some sad news. After more than 20 years, we will be shutting down Horseland at the end of this year. Starting January 1, 2019, the entire website will be down. Players won't have access to any of their pages, animals, images, etc.

It was a really hard decision for our entire team. We've loved being part of this amazing community with you for so many years. As you may know, the main parts of the Horseland game use "Flash" technology. This technology is obsolete, and is no longer able to run on many devices. The future of gaming is in apps. But the cost to develop and run a successful app is prohibitive.

As you may be aware, the Horseland game started in 1994 when I was a girl. I was obsessed with horses and took riding lessons - but never had a horse of my own. I begged my parents nearly every day for a horse. It was then that my father, who was a computer engineer, helped create the original Horseland game for and (eventually) with me. It was how I learned to love computer programming, which I later studied in college and did for a career. The game grew from basic bulletin boards, to a very popular text and 2D image based game. In 2006 we partnered with a cartoon company. They made the Horseland cartoon that ran on CBS, and we updated the game to include 3D shows, the World, and player and horse avatars.

Special thanks to the ModSquad who helped make Horseland a real community!

Please take screenshots and download images of anything you might like to save after the website is down.

We will miss you and all our players.

Best Regards,
Christina
President of Horseland

HP is doing just fine! We're not going anywhere :).

We have a dedicated and active player base and we have plans for the future to make sure we stay around for a long time! No one can predict what gaming and the internet will look like in the distant future, but assuming that we continue to evolve and nothing catastrophic happens and all of our members don't decide to all leave us en masse, I imagine we will still be here.

There have been a lot of games closing in the last couple of years, but from knowing quite a few owners and developers and hanging out on owner/developer forums, I can tell you that the vast majority of games have closed either because their owners had unrealistic time/cost expectations or because they refused to adapt to changing expectations. Not because there weren't players to play them. There are several successful sim games out there who are doing just fine and lots of HP's most dedicated players also play games in other genres. It's not mutually exclusive.

I'm not going to call out specific games, but I'll just say that running HP is my full time job and I still can't manage to do everything that needs to be done. So a few years back when a lot of people decided they wanted to open their own games, many of them thought they could treat it like a hobby rather than a business. And I get it in a way, you don't usually get into this type of thing if you don't love the games in the first place, but at the end of the day they are for-profit businesses and they need to be treated that way in order to survive. And a rampant problem with older games that have disappeared from the internet is that they ignored good community management, which has become the "norm" over HL's laissez-faire attitude, so when the communities on games were ignored (or in some cases treated poorly) they evetually withered away and died.

Basically, what I'm trying to say here is that the internet and it's expectations change all the time, so games like this that are meant to keep players long term have to change with it.

With HL specifically, I know I've said this before in chat, but I don't think they had a choice when they changed the game in 2008. I'm just speculating, but while it was massively popular for a long time, they frequently didn't fix major bugs for months or make any sort of announcements addressing issues which isn't the behavior of a site that's doing well (or at least not one that's being managed well). They basically let it run like the wild west. And a game that opened in 1994 and then was largely neglected probably had coding issues that couldn't be patched. So after they got the TV deal, it made sense for them to recode the entire game because it probably needed to happen anyway and make it more in line with their new brand because the audience watching the TV show was not the audience that was playing the game, and those kids weren't going to login to a text based game expecting it to be like the cartoon they watch and then stick around. But they recoded the game in flash, which is horrifically expensive to use and maintain AND has since been dropped by most major browsers. Also, I think there was probably a bit of a miscalculation on how much change their veteran players would put up with and how interested younger kids would be in a partially text-based game that had a cyber-bullying issue. So all in all, I think this was inevitable. But in true HL style, they have neglected it so much that they apparently forgot to actually close the site.

Anyway! I know that's a novel that no one asked for, but there you go, haha.

Thank you for the post, Sam! It's interesting to get the point-of-view of a game's owner who can see things from that angle. 

seems like HL is finally really gone. It was entertaining to see some people still popong there. For me, who actually really struggles with foreong languages (i have mainly thought myself in english and HL deffinetly opened some windows for me) it is hard to get used to new enviorment. HP is well managed and thought trough, but may it be my age or whatever .. it sometimes feels so mutch complikated :) 

Oh, wow! Took them long enough to finally take it down. I'll miss it, but I'm so happy I've found HP and feel cozy in this place. :)

Looks like it's definitely all the way gone now. I feel weirdly sad about this lol.