One of XLGAMES lead designers for ArcheAge gave a talk at the Nexon Developer Conference and discussed about they were planning on focusing on more new PVE content based on data and statistics they learned from their 3.0 update with the new races and the resulting player retention rates in both South Korea and in other regions.
http://www.inven.co.kr/webzine/news/?news=176818&site=archeage
The biggest influence seems to have been from China (where Chinese players preferred the PVE content) which leads to the influence of the publisher there; Tencent which is the worlds largest gaming company.
This is why Tripod Studio has China as the next priority for Lost Ark since Tencent is going to be the publisher there. Simply put, money talks. Trion Worlds does not have that kind of cash to flash even though ArcheAge is a decent revenue generator for them. The companies poor reputation does not create goodwill with a larger majority of players where some downright refuse to touch anything Trion publishes. I was one of those who was very initially hesitant about Trion Worlds publishing Devilian and for a moment, it seems like they weren’t as bad as I had thought.
But as time passed, almost everything that others said about this company, turned out to be true. Trion Worlds bottom dwellers are Defiance (in-house developed) and Devilian (3rd party). The former is pretty much in a maintenance mode of sorts whereas the latter is going to be on near life support.
There are some fairly naive players who are holding out hope that there is going to be some miraculous appearance of actual new content in the future. The Devilian team does not even have any sort of producer anymore. There has been no one actively working with or discussing things with Bluehole Ginno besides the most basic of things.
The writing has been on the wall once Trion Worlds shrank that team. There used to be several in-game GM’s which shrunk down to two throughout most of 2016. In February 2017, there were rumors circulating again about layoffs. Trion did confirm there were layoffs but from outside development. Shortly after this, I noticed the last two game masters (who were part of this particular guild which originally housed all the Ravan GM’s) were no longer around (one of them was an evoker and the other a cannoneer) and unsurprisingly were part of this.
I wouldn’t have an issue spending a bunch of money on a publisher that gave a damn. I can’t in good faith conscious spend even a couple of hundred dollars on Trion Worlds because the management there doesn’t give a shit about quality (even though the front line folks do). I am not going to be a party to lining the pockets of those higher level executives especially when all they care about is making money at the expense of everything else.
This also highlights the reality of how there aren’t many decent North American and European publishers (when it comes to 3rd party publishing). As soon as I saw who the North American and European publisher for Soul Worker Online was going to be, I said forget it and rolled on the Japanese server.
