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Report: Gamigo Hit With Layoffs Impacting RIFT, Trove And More | MMORPG.com
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Report: Gamigo Hit With Layoffs Impacting RIFT, Trove And More | MMORPG.com
It seems that MMO publisher Gamigo has been hit with layoffs affecting multiple teams at the publisher, notably the oft-forgotten MMO, RIFT.
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For those who had a real hand in the direction of the company: this is a repercussion to a job poorly done. For the individual team members, this is unfortunate.
Don't take my post as stating it's their fault, you echoed my meaning. I can see how it could be taken sarcastically. Going to edit.
My memory must be serving me poorly, Trion indeed was a shit company as well. But okay....Gamigo is still horrible.
The official forums for the game have been down for 2 months also.
At the end Trion couldn't even fix a seasonal event in Rift from one year to next when it broke. Even then the game was essentially in a maintenance mode they couldn't maintain. So, things were already quite dire as you say.
So many say, except perhaps for those that still enjoy the games they keep in operation. I'm interested in seeing how things go with Fractured Online as I it will be the first newly released game they are involved with so far as I know.
I still play Rift casually with my guild Free Masons who are very strong in game , over 25 members daily online , and they indeed are very grateful they still have Rift to play .. Otherwise without Gamigo it would have shuttered long ago
Fishing on Gilgamesh since 2013
Fishing on Bronzebeard since 2005
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Most likely due to anyone at Gamigo who can respond to MMORPGs inquiries with any answers are no longer employed there.
It's good people still have the opportunity. Rift had some interesting elements that set it apart such as the rifts themselves and there many applications beyond just spontaneous breaches to close and the souls system for character customization.
The world also has some pretty interesting areas. I can't remember the name of it, but I found the region with the mix of aquatic and dry areas amazing. It's not often you can walk from the dried out bottom of a seabed directly into the sea as though passing through a wall of water, and then swim about it at varying depth as one would expect.
Frankly speaking I had a huge nerf to my favored soul combinations, and the increased difficulty coupled with the huge decrease in playerbase (and now, a decrease in backend) just has me going.... why? And by that I mean why..... continue.... As to Trove. I really liked it early to mid on, but they kept pumping out content with little regard to the ui, or even solo players. I can't do half the content without massive grinding. And collecting is now a huge chore because the ui has not reflected the 9 million biomes and items added in the interim. Still these are both SOLID games that deserved much better than they got, hell, much better than they are getting...
And what have Gamigo done to improve the situation for any of the games under them? They acquired Trion, Aeria Games and probably something else I can't remember. They shut down several games like Eden Eternal and Defiance and some more I can't remember right now. Aeria had at least half of their MMOs shut down after the acquisition.
ArcheAge neither stayed the same or improved, but got worse instead. I never really played RIFT, because it felt like a bad WoW clone, even Asian WoW clones felt more interesting, so I don't know if it was really bad before Gamigo took over, but I can say for sure that the game either remained the same or gotten worse due to neglect.
Whether Trion were doing a bad job before that or not shouldn't matter, because when they get acquired, their operations should become directly affected by the higher ups at Gamigo.
Before acquiring Aeria and Trion, Gamigo had three notable MMORPGs - Last Chaos, Fiesta and Loong Online. Last time I tried playing Loong Online a few years ago, the game's launcher was broken and could not patch the game, I asked for assistance on the forums, no response for a week, I uninstalled the game and many months later I checked to see fi there was any development and some random user had posted under my thread giving some suggestions and saying that I had better give up, because they no longer care about the game.
Gamigo's portfolio right now is Aeria's dying games that they still haven't shut down for whatever reason, Trion's drying games that they still haven't shut down for whatever reason and their own games that they still haven't shut down for whatever reason. Their "biggest" player right now is that Indie MMO About Nothing called Fractured Online and that game will be a flop right from the get-go.
Unless someone is a big fan of any of these games that are now under Gamigo, I don't see how any sane MMO player would want to deal with them right now after seeing all the damage they've done. Sometimes I wonder how do they even keep operating when they have so little games and they are all bad and outdated.
Dynamight Studios is not affected because they are the only studio that has independence under their agreement with Gamigo. While Dynamight Studios isn't letting anyone go right at this moment, it shouldn't be surprising unfortunately if that's not the case soon. Due to what's going on they aren't able to hire the people they need, which will definitely affect the future of the game.
It's a for profit company, which makes the reason obvious. The games are profitable enough for Gamigo to keep operating them.
What Fractured is about was made public a long time ago. If you're unaware of that it isn't because that information was unavailable.
They keep operating the same way any business does, by being profitable. In their specific case as they simply maintain games for the most part I expect there costs are lower than most game providers, allowing them to get by with less revenue and still remain viable.
That their involvement with Fractured Online bucks their normal trend makes me curious at to what they are up to. Why change what has worked for them.
Combined with their current layoffs it could well be a sign their business practices have now begun to fail and they are perhaps trying to switch gears away from that by trying to focus on something new or at least have such as part of their strategy.
City of Heroes was profitable at the time it shut down. But, being profitable alone isn't the goal of business. The goal is to maximize profits.
When you have many games you have many options. NcSoft apparently thought they could get even more profits by investing the resources devoted to CoH elsewhere where possible while dumping the rest along with the costs associated to them.
Money is money, but if you could have money+ instead money alone loses appeal.
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