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Sandbox Interactive Confirms Staff Reduction to Pre-Beta Levels - Albion Online - MMORPG.com
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Sandbox Interactive Confirms Staff Reduction to Pre-Beta Levels - Albion Online - MMORPG.com
Albion Online News - Sandbox Interactive has confirmed that a number of employees have been released now that Albion Online is a fully released game. According to a statement from the team, this brings the numbers of active developers to pre-beta levels, generally a typical move for companies after the release of a game. Prior to the layoffs, staff numbers approximately 50. After the reduction, developer count is 31.
Comments
I don't really buy that "continue to grow" part cause the playerbase has significantly decreased but whatever.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
To put it in perspective,a team of 5 can accomplish a LOT once the game engine and various sub programs have been finalized.A team of 31 can do even more but somehow these games always look like nobody is working on them for the next year plus.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
a person passionate about games who chooses to pursue it,im glad you have a passion and you are chasing it. but if you have a family to support remember you choose to support them this way.
smart move would be SAVE as much as you can!
Though it isn't really surprising. Game is a PvP MMORPG and... not a very well-done one at that. Didn't take long for the honeymoon period to wear off for most folk as the grind settled in.
Hiding stuff behind insane grinds and PvP is the only way smaller devs can deal with how fast players chew content. The bigger devs like Blizz pretty much admitted failure with Legion and hid everything worthwhile behind the endless grind and RNG, and then slowly iterated upon the system as more and more players got angry.
Even in single player, the "open world" and its chores seems the only way devs are able to offer reasonable amounts of content. Almost every damn game nowadays is some sort of RPG with "progression", and if possible, open world with lots of irrelevant crap spread in it, 500 caves with random lootz and 300 "random events" with more RNG rewards.
Meanwhile MOBAs and competitive shooters thrive with minimal content "hey guys, we made a new map! here, a new hero too!" by virtue of players being content for each other.
I find the whole state of the gaming industry rather worrying. It's in the process of morphing from a work of passion to a full "it's just business" model. And unless devs/publishers will not accept having to make some sort of sacrifice and pretty much work more for less, or a new content developing method is invented, we gonna be stuck with this for a long while - random events, random loot, random everything, laced with some PvP and sold to the masses.
Well if they make it F2P they have to deal with a lot of Gold Sellers, but I hear they finally made the changes to the game to address what they should have during beta when it was called out to them to remove the ability to directly trade gold to silver, because of the fraud issues the company claimed to be having, now it wouldn't be an issue, but there would be an influx of bots, I've seen the YouTube video of the cheat program which allows people to walk under the map and harvest resources and stuff.
Albion, as a game could have been so much more is the problem, the issue was developers who refused to listen to it's customers who backed this game for 4 years, in some cases "barring" accounts from accessing the game without providing evidence, then admitting in support tickets it may not have been accurate, this happened to quite a few people especially some after I found an article on a popular cheat website which said if you want to get anyone barred it's easy to do by getting currency from a 3rd party, or fraudulent activity and giving it to anyone you want gone from the game.
One of the biggest problems of Albion was since beta, they tried Cross-Platform, rather than making it PC exclusive the problem with this is RuneScape like graphics, and with Black Desert Online, and Upcoming MMORPG titles like Ashes / Crow Fall, this is where a bigger population is going to head simply because the graphics are amazing compared to Albion.
Now Albion as a small indie game could have still been great, but part of the problem is the removal of certain housing since the first Alpha tests 3+ years ago, unbalanced PVP Combat, DEV team that want's to add restrictions to how many healers can go into an Arena and so on, at that point the game is no longer a sandbox.
The PVE in Albion as well is one of the most boring games I have ever played, the PVP, and Economy is the only thing that kept me playing Albion for as many years as I did up until the company decided that its illegal to freely trade in the game without risking banishment.
Yet another issue is how Albion Devs removed the fame scores to try to cover up population decline but that doesn't work because if the game had enough income they wouldn't be letting developers go, but its all for the best those who did get lay off I hope they find a better job with a more reputable company a real game design company.
The biggest mistake of Albion as a game, was launching too soon, this was by far one of the worst decisions ever made, the company knew in beta that Gold Sellers were commiting fraud, they had one month to disable Gold to Silver transactions so that gold sellers couldn't do this at launch, and they failed to do so, so this lead to The Iron Bank Incident, something you get banned for on Albion forums if you even ask about it, but basically a Guild Lost their holdings and had to deal with drama that shouldn't have ever been there had the developers have taken that one month to do their job and improve the game when they clearly knew what was going on.
Over-All the only thing I can see is Albion closing down especially when they fired Guessing around 20 people or something I personally hope Korn was fired but besides that the Awful Customer Service, when you file a ticket your ticket gets passed around from person to person you have no idea who you are even talking to unlike World OF Warcraft when a [GM Bob} for example answers your ticket you know who you are talking to with Albion it's nowhere like this, so basically your ticket goes from person to person, and just gets copy/paste responses, especially when it comes to account banishments, chat mutes, or any of these so called issues, its generally just the worst support especially when a "Developer" in a game is allowed to get involved in "Socail / Player Interactions" and make judgement calls compared to World OF Warcraft, Blizzard, or any of these other companies each has a department that actually specializes in such Alibion is just a small indie team that doesn't have this.
I could not recommend Albion to anyone due to their past mistakes, failure to fix their mistakes, and 4.5.1 of the User Agreement, it's a sandbox game, and only games I could recommend at the moment that are actually MMORPG titles are Elder Scrolls Online, Black Desert, Crow Fall, Ashes OF Creation, Guild Wars 2, Although GW2 is my least favorite because the developers don't seem to know what they are doing either IMO still better than this.
Well when you have a customer base that wants everything for free, and won't play games that they deem too P2P and or P2W it's hard to have the cash flow to pay your employees.. So yeah it seems that the only business modle that is working now a days is to do a kickstarter come out with a new ship to sell every month to support the development of a game for as long as you can!!!
Its not about customers willingness to pay.
Gonna be hard to "keep the good updates coming" like you think they used to when they have half as much staff.