“Assignment for the benefit of the creditors process”. This is what was specified in Gamigo’s corporate press release. In simpler english, Trion Worlds was effectively out of cash (insolvent) and had creditors phoning it in. Is any of this surprising to me? Hell no!
So let me just get this off my chest at the start; you reap what you sow Trion. And this is directed specifically at the management team.
The layoffs with ArcheAge back in July was not a good sign in terms of not meeting metrics (likely a severe drop off in revenues) not to mention murmurings of RIFT not being in maintenance mode despite the fact that it takes reading between the lines to know that Trion wasn’t being completely forthcoming. Add to this the acquisition of Gazillion Entertainment (burning through cash but also possibly with the objective to put the company up for sale before the crap really hit the fan) but with Trion once again trying to do something they had done before (first a storefront for other titles and then, trying to sell themselves as a publishing platform; the latest was trying to appeal to game developers to utilize the Glyph platform in a twist of what they tried to promote before. Very few bit because of Trion’s poor reputation.
Almost every single trick that they were attempting to execute over the past year has literally gone nowhere in terms of growing the bottomline and that has to do with how the company has taken its playing customers for granted over the years to where their reputation turned into a huge negative (where many including myself, vowed to never touch anything from them again). And that aspect was more so when they directly contributed to dealing a huge death blow to one of my personal favorite titles, Devilian earlier this year (the pivotal point was downsizing the Devilian team in July 2016 and letting go the wrong people). And back then (when they sunset Devilian in March), I said that karma has a way of rearing its head. Well, here we are only 8 months later…
Part of my Devilian-Info site was meant to document how poorly Trion Worlds handled the game and it’s community especially after downsizing the Devilian team (letting go both Andrew “Drewcifer” Sipotz and Sarah “Kiwibird” Walters). And that project has been stuck in limbo because I had no place to put the uncompressed archive of their forums (22GB in total). Trion managed to do themselves in to where I can now focus more purely on the details about what used to exist.
No, I don’t like that there are good people who have lost their jobs in this move. These folks are usually the front line employees who have to deal with the boneheaded decisions made by those higher up in the company. I know very well how many of their CSR folks in Texas didn’t have the proper tools to do their jobs effectively because of those higher up in the company who were frankly operating in their own reality distortion field.
And no, this isn’t going from bad to better; Gamigo is not much better than Gameforge (both are the largest Germany based publishers servicing games in multiple regions). I mentioned Gamigo when talking about Warlords Awakening; where I brought up Insel Games CEO Patrick Streppel (who formerly performed an asset flip of Embergarde aka Guardians of Ember which was recently acquired by Gameforge) who had setup this (asset flipping) consulting firm (IME also in Germany) where they assisted wanna be publishers on how to acquire dying or dead IP’s (mostly from Asia) and rebrand them along with all the other aspects (business operations, monetization, marketing, etc). Streppel was previously the CEO of Gamigo and thus have their business model based on this aspect (which is why their portfolio looks as awful as it does). Gamigo also acquired Aeria Games back in 2016.
So don’t be surprised if several Trion games are going to meet their death once Gamigo’s monetization changes hits those games. Let me back up just a bit; some titles after initial evaluation may be shuttered fairly quickly (possibly RIFT and Defiance). Atlas Reactor is a tossup. Trove is pretty much the only title guaranteed to maintain a modicum of continued success going forward (and is probably what they wanted the most besides the customer data they will be getting as part of the deal).
What about ArcheAge? Ah haha, ahahahaha. That’s a perfect one for Gamigo to continue to farm the wallets of those players who will continue to throw money at it but I have no idea how the business relationship will change between XLGames and Gamigo’s subsidiary Padmapani, GmbH who are in control of Trion Worlds assets from the acquisition. Depending on the terms of the publishing contract, XL could always terminate the agreement with Padmapani depending on whether or not Padmapani will honor the contract currently in place (or vice versa). I’m presuming that Trion signed a 5-year deal with XL which would have it set to expire sometime in 2019 (Gamigo may just ride out that contract to see what kind of revenues come out from the game).
So I guess this is sort of the end of an era with “Trino Please” now being taken over by a company that isn’t any better.
UPDATE: ArcheAge’s executive producer posted a short announcement from XLGAMES.
He also posted a message that he has and other remaining members of the ArcheAge team were given offers and will be signing on with Gamigo AG. This makes sense given Gamigo’s merger with Aeria Games (due to their in-roads in publishing titles from Asia) plus they probably see revenue making opportunities if they looked over the numbers (given the amount of whales who still spend a lot of money per month on the game).
The majority of the RIFT development team were not retained and one of the art leads/animators for Trove (Robin Luera) was also let go. RIFT will likely head into an interim maintenance mode while they will likely run Trove as lean as possible with the bare minimum of artists, game designers, and programmers.
