Why did Disney close down VMK, for real?
Hey Swagbee. I imagine that Disney shut down VMK for the same reason why any corporation would cease to provide any service: they believed that it would cost more to keep the game running than they stood to gain by continuing to run the game. When Disney shut down VMK, they had already acquired Club Penguin. They likely believed that Club Penguin would absorb a large portion of VMK's user base, and that these users would then become paid subscribers. It seems like a good plan. That way, Disney would only need to operate one platform, which they believed would be more profitable than running both VMK and Club Penguin and therefore paying the costs associated with running both games while they competed in the same market space. That may tie-in to what
@riddleguy mentioned regarding upgrading platforms, though obviously if Habbo Hotel could afford to upgrade, then the Walt Disney Company could certainly afford to upgrade VMK. Perhaps the upgrade costs (assuming that an upgrade was, in fact, needed) factored into the decision that continuing to operate VMK was no longer a sound business plan.
However, one factor for which Disney likely failed to account is that shutting down a game that people loved (not to mention spent money to go to Disney Parks and do IRL quests) is not likely to earn you loyal customers. Personally, I had accounts on both sites, and I actually stopped using Club Penguin when the VMK shutdown was announced. I would imagine that relatively few VMK players migrated to Club Penguin and became paid members. Instead, that market share was mostly either soaked up by inferior substitutes like VFK, or stopped inhabiting online virtual worlds, entirely. And so instead of converting VMK players to Club Penguin players, they mostly succeeded in decreasing the number of users in Disney's virtual worlds. It was certainly a business decision to shut VMK down, but I imagine that the decision likely backfired.