Buried in the announcement that EverQuest would be going Free2Play in March comes the news that on the same day the lone EQ Mac server will be shutting down forever. EQ Mac has always been limited to one server that was forever detached from the PC version in a perpetual Planes of Power version of the game. Smed took to the official forums to explain why Al’kabor is shutting down:

1) It uses a very old codebase that only one of our programmers knows. The simple truth is that’s not something we can allow. We can’t have a single point of failure and in this case we have one.

2) The user population is very small and it makes justifying adding additional coding resources hard.

3) The mac port is not particulary something we’re proud of. The stuff we’ve done on Free Realms with Transgaming is far superior. Everquest was never designed to be a Mac game, and years ago we tried this and it never took off. Back when we did the port, Mac wasn’t the hotness that it is now.

4) Why don’t we give the players the source code and let you do it? Simply put – it’s got too many proprietary things to make that feasible. We just can’t do it.

He did post a poll asking if players wanted a Mac port of the current EQ, which at this time is getting a pretty solid response from the small Mac playerbase. SOE has done Mac versions of FreeRealms and Clone Wars Adventures, and WoW is proof that there is a big Mac playerbase for MMOs. This is the third MMO shutdown SOE has done following The Matrix Online and Star Wars Galaxies.