This news was actually announced last week but it wasn’t even on my radar since I was busy taking care of packing up all my stuff on my properties in ArcheAge Unchained (I don’t trust their scripts will work properly).
But yes, Gamigo is shutting down 4 titles: Eden Eternal, Twin Saga, Defiance, and Defiance 2050. The latter two are of course Trion developed properties that came with the acquisition. Eden Eternal and Twin Saga came with Gamigo’s acquisition of Aeria Games. I played Twin Saga for a short bit when Aeria Games operated as its own entity (cute title operated by a company with a completely pay2win mentality). Gamigo however couldn’t even keep these niche anime games alive because they are another level of “milk the cow until we drive off the players”.
As for Defiance and Defiance 2050, those aren’t surprising. I mentioned early on they were candidates for paring (Atlas Reactor ended up being the first casualty and the company has the shameless nerve trying to reinvent it with PvE content in their $20 early access cash grab attempt with Atlas Rogues). So that now leaves RIFT (which has been largely ignored as most of the actual dev team was let go early on) and Trove as the remaining Trion developed titles (besides the before mentioned Atlas Rogues which is merely a cash grab that has no longevity and will end up facing the same shuttering as its predecessor).
Basically, everything Gamigo is telegraphing is pressure to increase revenue and profits. ArcheAge and ArcheAge Unchained as third party published title contracts, may have other metrics being imposed by XLGAMES and their new overlords, Kakao Games. Kakao would no doubt like to just cut out the middleman publisher (Gamigo) and do it themselves like they are with the SEA version.
The fact they rushed out the merger announcement after a very issue filled transfer service, and now a rapid fire announcement of this fresh start just a day before the actual server merger maintenance (taking into account the nearly weekly bonus credit promos, their attempts to introduce loot boxes into the game via the Glyph store since it is clear XL does not want them directly in the Unchained version), is pretty much Gamigo now being fully into the “milk this franchise for all its worth before we lose our publishing rights” territory. The thing is the hardcore ArcheAge playerbase will continue to feed this pig (former Trion folks like Khrolan and Tinen know exactly how much that part of the playerbase is willing to put up with) and so the only way to drastically milk the Unchained player base, is by monetizing fresh starts (at an accelerated pace) behind some sort of paid content update.
