After operating the free MMO service for nearly three years, Disney will be closing the Virtual Magic Kingdom, a free-to-play virtual world mimicking the Disneyland's theme parks online and originally launched to coincide with Disney's 50th Anniversary Celebration in 2005.

Speaking with newspaper Los Angeles Times, Walt Disney Internet Group president Steve Wadsworth explained, "It never achieved scale. It was promotional. There was no business model attached to it. It had a small but passionate audience."

Since Disney announced that it would be closing its Virtual Magic Kingdom, that passionate audience has gathered nearly 20,000 signatures for an online petition protesting the service's termination. Other fans of the MMO have gone so far as to write letters to Disney chief executive Robert Iger imploring him to cancel the closing. Disney has so far not announced any plants to extend the service past today.

Disney Internet Group spokesman John Spelich hopes that Virtual Magic Kingdom's users will move on to Disney's other virtual world offerings, including Club Penguin, which supports free and subscription-based memberships, and Disney Fairies, a forthcoming virtual world built around Tinker Bell and her friends: "At Disney, we'd rather do anything in the world than disappoint a guest. But we hope our VMK players will choose to sample some of the other ways to engage with Disney online through disney.com or through virtual worlds."