Over on the Gamigo RIFT forums, someone posted some information that was gleamed from Gamigo’s parent company Media and Games Invest (MGI) Q3 financial report; the gory details of MGI’s majority stake in Gamigo AG can be found on their company website.
The only time I pore through such filings are for companies that I am actually interested in investing in. Gamigo isn’t on that list so I have had no desire to go through them since I’d rather waste my time watching paint dry then reading through their corporate spin.
And boy did they do a lot of spinning in this report. It should be noted that these investor and financial analyst focused reports are considered material information that also tends to be vetted by corporate and IR legal before they are released (since they do have to abide by security and exchange regulations). But as anyone should be aware of, corporate executives have had a long history of PR spin doctoring and being not totally upfront about things (witness the mess that is happening with Activision Blizzard).
With Gamigo, this Q3 report has some notes that are close to borderline lying when it comes to their loss of the publishing of the ArcheAge franchise in the west (specifically the NA and EU regions). The following is from page 23 in the report.
This is full of corporate spin. Back in Q3 2019, their revenues were being driven by their acquisition of Trion’s assets (specifically with Trove and the pre-orders for ArcheAge Unchained). Post launch of Unchained, revenues continued to be driven by Unchained (while legacy saw much lower revenue and engagement). However, that business model (buy-to-play with cosmetics only cash shop) was unsustainable because you also need worthwhile cosmetics worth buying (not just recolors of the same design; XLGAMES has always been lousy in this area).
So it came as no surprise when Gamigo began to backtrack on their initial promise of “buy once and play all of the content” as well as the cosmetic only premium track of the ArchePass. The Garden of the Gods instance was launched as a paid DLC for Unchained in May 2020. The game however is NOT designed to have portions of content, paywalled off as DLC. It’s a mostly open world game (the Garden zone was designed by XLG as an instance though) with dungeon instances. There has been a large amount of previously open world events that have been moved into instances though including the Halcyon Golden Plains Battle. So they could not pull the same stunt with the Rise of Nehliya update which opened up Mysthrane Gorge on Auroria (north of Whalesong Harbor and west of the West Hiram Mountains).
Just this DLC alone was not enough to sustain continual recurring revenue growth (what investors tend to want to see year over year). So in October 2020, Gamigo made changes to the ArchePass that no one in the player base was asking for. That included the elimination of the 3 different tracks (putting it all into a single track) and added a whole bunch of questionable items in the premium track. Then in December, they added a more expensive (it costs 3000 credits to unlock the premium track) non-expiring Advanced ArchePass which contained even more questionable items in its premium track.
Regardless, these were still money makers for them since Unchained continued contributing to Gamigo’s bottomline throughout 2020 and 2021 (before they learned they would not have their publishing contract extended).
In the mean time, RIFT had been barely mentioned in these financials reports. To make matters even more dire, there was unofficial reports in March 2021 about the remaining developers who worked on the game, being let go (this was around the same time that Gamigo was going to shutter 4 different games including two of the Trion properties, Defiance and Defiance 2050).
Now with the Q3 2021 financial report, they are playing up RIFT (calling it successful but one they did not update for a long period, and will now see a “first great update in Q1 2022”, while borderline lying about how low performing ArcheAge was for them. It’s word play here. Yes, ArcheAge (Legacy) has been doing poorly. ArcheAge Unchained is where the revenue and player engagement was (yes, it has pared back drastically since 2019, but numbers wise, was still in their top 10 out of all their other graveyard titles). MGI just chose to use ArcheAge’s Legacy numbers to spin the reason why they failed to have the publishing contract extended (spinning it as a decision to discontinue publishing it and mutually parting ways).
I feel really bad for RIFT players because the ones who are really fans of the game (and have stuck with it), are going to be led on by this shameless company that has found ways to drive most everything they get their hands on, into the ground. Now they have to spin the loss of ArcheAge and ArcheAge Unchained as not a biggie; something they’ll make up with Trove Switch, some unnamed sandbox they are teasing, and the “FIRST GREAT UPDATE FOR RIFT”. If RIFT was the success they claimed it to be, why the hell did they not update it since 2019 (or why did they let go most of the development team at the very beginning when they acquired Trion’s assets)? The answer is they are LIARS. Gamigo’s chief game officer (who was the executive producer of ArcheAge at Trion, but now oversees all of Gamigo’s titles) Merv Lee Kwai is also a liar (no tricks, no traps my ass). And these material statements in their financials are borderline false.
They couldn’t even launch SkyDome or Atlas Rogues (both have been cancelled). What Gamigo is doing is damage control because they frankly lost a huge revenue generator (the combination of both ArcheAge and ArcheAge Unchained). They now have to boost their existing portfolio (Trove Switch was already in the works and Trove has always done well) including RIFT, while trying to acquire or make deals with other game developers.
All I know is that I learned that it was not a lie that Gamigo was bad, that there was indeed a game company that was worse than Trion; it just happened to end up being a worst company (Gamigo) that ended up acquiring the assets of that lousy company (Trion). I’m no fan of Kakao Games, but I will take them handling the publishing of ArcheAge and Unchained over Gamigo (which I will avoid at all costs going forward). Good riddance Gamigo, you will not be missed.
