Zenith's Servers Close December 18, and Ramen VR Is Not Leaving an Offline Version Behind

Zenith goes offline at 10:00 AM Pacific on Friday, December 18. Ramen VR set the date on October 21, in a post on Steam and on its own site. That leaves 58 days, after which, the post says, "the live service game will not be accessible."

Nothing is planned to outlast it. The announcement's own FAQ asks whether there will be an offline version or community-hosted servers, and it answers in one line: "No, not at this time."

The game is listed as Zenith: Nexus on Steam and the Meta Horizon Store, a free download with two modes: Infinite Realms, which is free to play, and The Last City, the original open-world MMO, which is a paid add-on. Both run on Ramen VR's servers.

The wind-down runs in three steps. Sales of The Last City and of Zennies, the premium currency, ended October 21 "across all platforms." New players can download the free client until November 18. Existing players keep access until the servers close.

What owners can still do

Spend the Zennies. The post says they stay usable in game until the shutdown, and that is the entire currency policy: it says nothing about refunds, either for unspent Zennies or for The Last City.

Support is thin. Active player support ended in September 2024, according to the studio's FAQ, a month after the last new content shipped, and the new post promises only that Ramen VR will help "when we can."

Steam has not caught up with the cutoff. On the morning of October 22, The Last City's Steam listing still showed a $9.99 Add to Cart button. A purchase today buys 57 days of an MMO. Valve's refund policy covers DLC for 14 days, as long as the base game has been played for under two hours since the purchase, which is a narrow window for a game built around long sessions.

Profitable in 2022, losing money by 2024

Zenith launched January 27, 2022, on Quest and PC VR. It started as a 2019 Kickstarter that raised $280,000. Two months after launch, Ramen VR closed a $35 million Series B led by Anthos Capital and Dune Ventures, taking its outside funding past $45 million, Road to VR reported at the time. Chief executive Andy Tsen told the outlet: "We're already profitable." The money was meant to double the studio and turn Zenith into "a gaming super-app containing multiple worlds."

It went the other way. In February 2024 the game went free. Infinite Realms launched as a free-to-play mode on February 27, and The Last City moved behind the paywall as DLC. Season 4: Golden Isles, released August 27, 2024, was the final content update. The same update cut The Last City from $29.99 to $9.99.

The reason was posted in July 2024 and reads the same today. "Even though we've had hundreds of thousands of players, the vast majority of them stopped playing Zenith after about a month," the studio's FAQ says. "Zenith started losing money." This week's post finishes the thought: "It isn't feasible for us to continue running the servers at a loss."

The players who stayed liked it. Zenith holds a 4.2 out of 5 from more than 7,000 ratings on the Horizon Store, so the studio's own diagnosis is retention, not reception. Ramen VR then kept the servers running for almost 28 months after the last update, paying to host a game it was no longer building.

How the notice compares

VR.org has tracked a run of multiplayer shutdowns this year, and the notice periods differ. So does what survives.

• Ultimechs. Resolution Games gave 12 days' notice before online play ended on October 20. The game stayed playable as single-player, and bought UltiCoins stayed spendable.
• A Township Tale. Alta announced the closure on June 25 and switched the servers off on July 20, 25 days later.
• Hyper Dash. Triangle Factory shipped a final update that keeps the game launchable offline after November 1. A license on third-party software blocks community hosting.

Zenith's 58 days is more warning than two of those. What it lacks is any fallback: without an offline build or player-run servers, the app stops being a game at 10:00 AM Pacific on December 18, for everyone at once.

Ramen VR has moved on, under the shorter name Ramen. Its website describes "an AI company building agents for interactive 3D," and its product is an agent for Unreal and Unity called Aura. The 2022 pitch was a super-app full of worlds. The 2026 product builds worlds for other studios.

For players, the math is short. Zennies are worth something until 10:00 AM Pacific on December 18 and nothing after it, so spend them. Skip The Last City on Steam: its own developer stopped selling it on October 21, and $9.99 now buys less than two months of it. Owners who paid $29.99 before the August 2024 price cut get the same 57 days. Use them.