Auran Developments announces it has retained a Voluntary Administrator and closed its doors, the unfortunate outcome of a recent flurry of news surrounding the Australian developer that began with rumors of staff cuts (story) which were subsequently confirmed (story) followed by the announcement of a new free business model for Fury, accompanied by indications that further bad news was coming (story). Here's word from Auran's Tony Hilliam announcing the closure (though as previously stated a small team will continue to support Fury, their PvP MMOG) and confirming that the free Chosen update for Fury is still going live tomorrow:

Auran: the facts

The Directors of Auran Developments, the company that employs all the Auran staff, have today called in a Voluntary Administrator (like Chapter 11 in the US). All the staff were dismissed today. Despite earlier reports, staff will be paid for all their work to date, their annual leave entitlements, redundancy payments and long service leave.

Whilst this is the end of Auran Developments, it is far from the end of FURY and Trainz.

Trainz is the world’s leading rail simulator and has a community of more than 250,000 registered users around the world. It is published in dozens of countries and there are many products in the market today. The bulk of the Trainz team will continue to work on current projects and these projects will be released next year.

With Fury, we built up a team to make a world beating game and sadly we have not reached our goals – yet. Our performance to date has meant we could no longer fund the 70 strong dev team. However, FURY: Age of the Chosen will be launched as planned Friday 8pm GMT. We have put together a small but committed team to continue developing FURY on an ongoing basis. This core team, as we announced last week, are a passionate group of people committed to making FURY a success. We will be releasing bug fixes, content and feature updates on a regular basis and in fact they will be more frequent with our new agile team.

I believe that once people hear about F:AotC and the new Free to Play business model, we’ll start building up the player numbers and revenues that will make the game successful.