It is difficult to take what this company has to say at face value when the reality is often times not what their PR states. If you were a Devilian player back in 2017 and listened/took as gospel what the company was saying (working with Bluehole Ginno on new content), everything would have come across as “no fire here, nothing to see here, please move on”.
For those of us in the know though, we knew the company was unsurprisingly not telling the truth.
So when questions arise regarding RIFT being in maintenance mode, of course Trion isn’t going to say “y’all guessed right”. It’s not much different than having to read between the lines with the downsizing of the ArcheAge team last month where the company will do what it has always done; spin the reality.
Trove is their bread and butter right now so it is no surprise that gets a lot of updates (it also helps there is a lot of user generated content which they can draw on). ArcheAge continues to see updates because from XLGames point of view, it’s what allowed them to fund a lot of failed mobile gaming attempts over the last few years as opposed to using the majority of that revenue to improve ArcheAge.
So long as there are whales continuing to dump money into the game (thus generating revenues for both Trion and XL) for this cycle of fresh start, legacy, and merged servers (with recurring revenue from APEX and Patron since the latter is required for owning property), the design of “new content” will revolve around keeping this captive player base, continuing to run on the treadmill of being able to pay for the tax certificates (plus Patron) to maintain their plots of property (and the stuff on top of it and the stuff inside those structures).
RIFT on the other hand is going to be coming to that cross road where everything about it is going to begin showing its age (if it already isn’t). I know it uses Gamebryo as its engine so it’s not going to be a trivial task to upgrade it (basically would be cheaper to just design a completely new game). To cut to the chase, this is a title Trion develops internally and have had that full control over. Yet it is in this state where some in the community feel like it is in maintenance mode.
Defiance (also developed internally) had that same problem (with issues neglected over the years where the company had the gall to relaunch it as Defiance 2050 promising that it was a remaster with “brand new systems, game play mechanics, and cutting edge graphics”. The reality was far from that initial marketing message (the basic premise was mainly to get the game to run under PS4 and Xbox One while rebooting it on the PC so that there would be no need to maintain two different versions of Defiance on the PC where it’s CCU’s were already low).
The company hasn’t really cared that much about burning through customer goodwill because the decision makers there have this very narrow minded view that there are more suckers around the corner. The company also occasionally takes the dart board approach to see what sticks and what doesn’t (like RIFT Prime for example) which is why the “new” schtick they are trying with the Gazillion IP acquisition (which really isn’t new since there was a time when Trion published a bunch of games via Glyph before they tried 3rd party publishing starting with ArcheAge and then Devilian which they failed to live up to their original promises).
And this kind of track record is why I take what their PR says (when it comes to their denying specific rumors about layoffs and the health of one of their titles) with a block of salt. It’s why even though ArcheAge is F2P (and I could still be playing it the way I had been), I stopped logging in because that is one less concurrent login that pads an important metric (for both publisher and developer). And this isn’t Trion-specific either. The game industry has long gotten away with some fairly lousy business practices because let’s be honest hear, many of us players were willing participants. Some of these companies even offer mea-culpa’s about their past transgressions in hopes of latching on to the next big thing.
A perfect example is My.com addressing how they will handle the publishing of Ashes of Creation for the EU region where the My.com representative all but alluded to how many of their current F2P titles are effectively P2W/C and how their customer support hasn’t been the best; and how this will all be better handled. Customer support (service and communication) should always be high on the priority list; it’s frankly sad when this isn’t the reality. As far as Ashes of Creation goes, I gave my 2 cents about this before (it’s basically something I am not going to play).
As my recent postings about PLAYWITH and Warlords Awakening shows, it’s difficult to even get the point across to a company that they aren’t even living up to their own expectations of being community focused and their continued status quo path during early access only serves to prove my point that many of these companies have really chosen lip service first. Which is why when it comes to Trion, I stand steadfast with the “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” mantra since I gave them the benefit of the doubt with Devilian, and they failed miserably (and that is coming on the heals of poorly handling ArcheAge at launch and knowing that it’s original executive producer [Voss] was in charge of Devilian).
