PS Home Wannabe Nebula Realms Launches Unplayable

Published: October 28, 2016 9:56 PM /

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Nebula Realms Header

There are many games worth emulating, but I'm not entirely sure PlayStation Home is one of them. A free social service for the PlayStation 3 that was active from 2008 to 2015, PlayStation Home mostly consisted of people walking around and talking to each other, occasionally partaking in a minigame if they could beat the line. Nebula Realms seeks to fill the gap left by Sony's social space, but only for those who think it's a gap worth filling. Sadly, even for those folks, there's just one problem. The servers are down. The servers have been down since the game launched.

Nebula Realms is developed by Spanish independent studio XALOC Studios, who was originally named Kovok LTD before undergoing a name change. It appears to be their first game as well, and they have been working on it since they were founded in 2015. On October 25th they launched Nebula Realms on the PlayStation 4, with a PC and Mac version mentioned on their site likely still in development.

The problem is that it's impossible to play the game. Nebula Realms requires an internet connection to log onto its game world, but the servers are not currently online. MMOs go down, but the servers not going online appears to have been a problem since the game's launch.

The furthest possible to get in the game right now
The furthest possible to get in the game right now

A thread on Nebula Realms' official forums asks about the servers being down the day game goes live, with user "RyanRenfrow" asking the simple question:

Might be an obvious answer somewhere but how long will server maintenance be?
Less than 20 minutes later a response from Nebula Realms moderator "PYAWAKITT"
No timeframe on this.

Devs are working on it as quickly as possible.

Normally a game will be back a few hours, but this has continued. It takes a full day before Community Manager "Nebula_CM" steps in to get an official word from the devs.
Hello everyone ... we will post an update as soon as we have 1, but please keep in mind that we gave everyone access to the game so issues are to be expected.  Game like this usually have a closed beta stage which we did not have in order to give everyone a chance to test it.  We should hear something soon just hang in there and thank you for your patience and support.  :D
On the 27th there are two more posts from "PYAWAKITT" saying similar: the devs are still working on it. Around the same time, the game's official Facebook page made a pair of posts. The first, made at 1:18am on the 27th, said the following:
Hi,

Sorry to keep you waiting. Unfortunately, we still having server issues. Servers do work now, but, there is a huge bottleneck that we need to solve in order to make the game playable for everybody, until then, servers will be down.

Apologies again for the delay, we are working as hard as we possibly can to solve the problem. We will share more news as soon as we have them.

Xaloc Team

The second, also made on the 27th but this one at 7:13pm, reads as follows:
Hi,

Today we have made a lot of progress, we are almost there. If everything goes well the servers might be open to public before tomorrow evening.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused, we are working as hard as we can to fix the issue

Xaloc Team

Unfortunately, it seems that everything has not gone well. As of this writing, the servers are still down. Today, at about 5pm EST (which would be about 9pm in Spain's time zone) the community manager took to the forum's shoutbox to once again state the devs are still working on it and that there will be an update soon.

nebula-company-cm

The good news is that the game is free to play and appears to not have any microtransactions available at the current time, so you won't be losing any money if you grab it and there's no way anyone can accidentally spend money on the game. The bad news is that if you have any interest in playing Nebula Realms, you may be waiting a while longer yet.

We have reached out to creator XALOC Studios for more information and will update this as we learn more.


Quick Take

I have nothing but sympathy for the devs here, but this is the exact kind of stuff you absolutely need to have ironed out before launch. If you want to have an online only chat room/life simulator then go for it! I'll even try it because of my strange fascination with those experiences Just, before anything else, you need to make sure it actually works. Open and closed betas are important people.

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Samuel Guglielmo TechRaptor
| Reviews Editor

I'm Sam. I have been playing video games since my parents brought home a PlayStation whenever that came out. Started writing for TechRaptor for 2016 and,… More about Samuel