Now that it is known that Gamigo’s new MMO they were teasing is Fractured Online (what was formerly known simply as Fractured during its initial Kickstarter), it’s pretty clear that people should steer away from this game. Why? Because Gamigo is the GRAVEYARD for MMO titles. The modus operandi of the executive leadership is to milk the games they publish, until they can’t be milked any longer. In the case of losing the publishing rights for the ArcheAge IP for the NA/EU region, it was known that Kakao Games (which now owns a majority stake in ArcheAge’s developer, XLGAMES) wanted to cut out the middleman, and publish it on their own (Gamigo tried to put their own spin on this).
All of the promises about not heavily monetizing the game or not having pay to win (aka cash shop mechanics), don’t mean anything to this company. It doesn’t matter about the contractual relationship the developer (Dynamight Studios) and Gamigo (as publisher) has with regards to who controls the business model (Dynamight controls that with input from Gamigo).
Gamigo’s executive producer for Fractured Online Wes Conner, talked with Jacopo Gallelli from Dynamight about the business relationship the two companies will be going forward with. For those who don’t remember, Conner was the executive producer at Barunson E&A for Astellia; for all of the promises made pre-launch, the game unsurprisingly ended up depopulating (lack of content being a major issue), having the publishing taken over by the developer in partnership with a sketchy blockchain company, and eventually closing down on October 29, 2021 (it did last longer than I expected, but it didn’t negate the initial feeling I had regarding the longevity of the game).
Thus looking at that earlier interview when Conner was with Barunson, the above is yet another scripted interview which does little to change my opinion that the game isn’t going to last long under Gamigo (regardless of how Gallelli feels this partnership will give them the added resources to bring the game to fruition). Gamigo just does not operate that way (it’s about milking the cow, not investing a lot of their own capital into it); trying to release something that is a work in progress is going to end up like Astellia as an example (the KR version was already lackluster in that area, and that caused content starvation for the western version off the bat).
This is something still in early development. Gamigo didn’t even invest time into RIFT (the MMO they got as part of acquiring Trion Worlds assets after their insolvency in 2018); they let go most of the RIFT development early on by not retaining them and pretty much ignored it until they lost the publishing rights for ArcheAge. They also didn’t retain all of Trove’s design and development team either (and that was one of Trion’s money makers besides ArcheAge at the time of their insolvency). In plain english, they tried to use as little resources for the IP’s they owned as a result of the acquisition of Trion’s assets. To put it into more stark terms, Gamigo ended up shuttering Atlas Reactor, Defiance, Defiance 2050; these were 3 games internally developed by Trion. And they effectively ignored RIFT. So I don’t see how this particular relationship is going to fare any better. All I hear is BS in this interview.
The fact that they are talking about who owns the IP should be immaterial to what players (the customers) should care about. And while it is nice to know that Gamigo will have the global distribution rights to publish the game in any worldwide market it wants to enter, it is also immaterial as to what Gamigo gets out of it (which as Conner mentioned, they get a portion of the profits). What players (the customers) do care about is specifically how the game will be monetized. If you are going with a free to play model, then you have to make that money in the cash shop. We’ve already seen Gamigo fail with ArcheAge Unchained (going with a “buy once, get all the content and play forever” model with an initial cosmetics only cash shop, which they eventually backtracked on; charging for DLC content and adding power boosting items into the cash shop and ArchePass)..
And that was with an established game (in operation for over 7 years). You cannot snowjob already jaded MMO players with an interview like the above (sure, there are still suckers who keep falling for the same BS over and over again, but at least more have woken up after the whole Bless Online fiasco). But I guess we can watch what happens and see how this partnership has progressed an year from now.
