History of the game

Utopia is a massive multiplayer internet-based strategy game. Utopia came online in January 1999 after a series of betas, referred to by players as "First Beta," "Long Beta," and "Short Beta." 
The game's core mechanics and user interface have not changed much in the decades since it was designed. By default Utopia has tables of numbers on a black background and very few images.https://www.vice.com/en/article/evpwpj/utopia-online-game on 06/04/24 What set Utopia apart was its real-time gameplay, rather than the turn-based nature of the era's browser games, a 
"That you could randomly join a ghetto and be the top province in the game. At some point (around age 5) it became that you couldn't be a highly successful province in a nub kingdom because having 24 provinces to aid to you became too much of an advantage. At some point after that (about the time attack times went to less than once a day) you couldn't be a successful kingdom without people being entirely too active, or x-logging. At this point the userbase is in trouble because it takes a certain amount of crazy to have stuck with this game this long, and in general, that type of crazy is incredibly obnoxious. People were much nicer in general when the game started." - Floggerhttp://forums.utopia-game.com/showthread.php?618730-UF-News-An-interview-with-Mehul-Patel-creator-of-Utopia/page2 on 02/04/24 
== Paid features ==
Utopia is free to play; the game is supported by revenue from banner and pop-up advertising. 
On 31st October 2008 additional paid features were introduced to the game, including province sitting, moving and tradingSwirve Blog - Some clarificationshttps://web.archive.org/web/20090422160702/https://blog.swirve.com/2008/10/31/some-clarifications/ retrieved on 31st March 2024. 
Players can either pay a small fee for each Age or a one-time fee permanently for some minor in-game bonuses and removal of all advertising in the game.
== Ownership History ==
Game creator Mehul Patel was involved in the BBS-based gaming movement, and authored the BBS games Barren Realms Elite and Solar Realms Elite prior to moving to the web with Earth: 2025 an online multiplayer game. Utopia was originally created under the company Solaria Games, which had its roots as early as 1996. In 1999 Solaria Games was renamed to Echelon Entertainment, then renamed in July 2000 to Swirve.Com.
On July 1st, 2008, Swirve.com was acquired by OMAC Industries.
Utopia was acquired by MUGA LLC (Make Utopia Great Again) in February 2017 when the playerbase was around 3,300 active users.
== Reception ==
Utopia won the People's Voice Webby Award for Gaming Site of the Year in 20022002 Webby Winnershttps://winners.webbyawards.com/winners/websites-and-mobile-sites?years=21 retrieved on 23rd March 2023 and 20032003 Webby Winnershttps://winners.webbyawards.com/winners/websites-and-mobile-sites?years=20 retrieved on 23rd March 2023. 2002 saw Amazon.com beat cooking.com in the Webby's Commerce category and the debate has raged since whether Utopia or Amazon has been more successful. 
== Community and Communications ==
In addition to the in game mail and forum options, a variety of other communications have been used by players to coordinate their Kingdoms and alliances. The more active and competitive kingdoms have shared personal contact details between players for messages and calls at various hours of the day. 
Historically messaging tools including IRC, ICQ and MSN messenger were used by players. In Age 50 an in game chat function was added to the game for players to speak to other members of their Kingdom. 
As communication technology developed tools like Whatsapp and Slack became more popular. Under the ownership of MUGA the game setup an official Discord server, while many Kingdoms have their own discord servers which enables integration with the official game discord bot. 
Utopia had popular forums filled with discussions between players across the playerbase, as did several 3rd party sites like Utopia Temple. 
The forums are used less by players now, though age change threads are still created in the Announcements forum.
The community appears to now be mostly made up of veterans who have played for years or decades, some returning after long breaks. This can make it difficult for new players to learn the game, several members of the playerbase have described their own community as toxic.
== Tools ==
The player community has developed many free Utopia-related tools that have not been supported by the game developers. 
Many focused on intel sharing or formatting, designed to help players quickly share in-game information with each other. These tools include Utopia Angel, Utopia Prophet, Utopia Pimp, Utopia Resource, Munk and Utopia Metatron. 
Some of these, like Utopia Angel, were third-party software tools that had to be downloaded and installed, while others were web browser extensions. 
Under the ownership of MUGA LLC the features of Munk were integrated into the game, which included additional information in-game and a separate intel site. A bot integrated into discord was also incorporated as an official tool offered by MUGA.