As much as I’ve been crapping all over Gamigo (and the former Trion ArcheAge team that were retained to manage the production portion), it is also fair that I also highlight when they do positive things.
They have been slowly but surely banning exploiters and gold buyers in both NA and EU regions (several high gear score characters/accounts have had their equipment stripped and accounts permanently banned). “ZERO TOLERANCE” and “exploit early and fast” had become unstoppable memes after the ArchePass “world boss exploit” issue where they ended up reversing most of the original suspensions when it was decided that players were playing within the intended but extremely buggy ArchePass system (which was taken down a few days later).
More mining bots have been removed/banned from what I have seen (at least on Wynn West); none are at the spots they usually have been standing on (I always pass through the Gweonid starter area for my Blue Salt Brotherhood “raising a mount” quest and have seen most all of them disappear over the last week).
The Unchained PTS (PTS2) was also finally hooked into the Unchained backend as accounts should now be properly generating labor and also have Patron status enabled. The ArchePass “kill X mobs” where the text said it needed to be Ancestral Level 30 also seems to be a mistake in the translation since I was able to kill a level 50 mob and got credit for it (so it might mean it just needs to be level 30 and higher). There was one mission I re-rolled where it did specify legendary, mythic, or epic mobs so there are a lot more different type of missions within this category). I will need to try out the system for several days in order to see what sort of missions I roll daily, and how the “Change mission” button re-rolls them (I want to check to see how often it re-rolls the exact same ones). It also looks like they eliminated the need to unlock the category again with Gilda Stars after changing the mission
On a semi-related note, Gamigo also put out their fiscal Q3 2019 report in PDF form on their corporate investor site and a YouTube video (below).
Much of their revenues (and growth) is unsurprisingly related to the Trion acquisition (additive material enhancement to revenues from ArcheAge and Trove) and ArcheAge Unchained pre-orders (though portions of it were from their existing titles including Fiesta Online). That follow through from Unchained is expected through their current fiscal Q4.
The major challenge for them is on a forward going basis though now that Unchained is live (I wrote about some of this before). The unknown question is what sort of cannibalization will end up happening between “Legacy” (I hate how they use that term to describe the free to play version because they are in fact telegraphing how they view that version of the game in terms of what they would shutter first).
But as I mentioned before, Unchained lacks the synergy that existed between Patron, APEX, and credits with this recurring revenue stream they had (since you need that subscription to own property) and this doesn’t even include the cycle of fresh starts and associated packs. Fresh starts in the buy to play model is going to be a hard sell since they would have to convince the (non hardcore/ArcheAge addicted) player base to buy the game again. But it isn’t going to surprise me when they do try this sometime in the next 12-18 months when the revenues from this show a declining trend. There will also be some players who will eventually depreciate their free to play account once they reach a certain level of parity on Unchained (this will be a process that will play out over the next year).
As for myself, my initial buy in is all that I’m willing to spend unless things change dramatically with how they deal with the existing issues and later, roll out future content updates. Their handling of Unchained during this first month has been incompetent at best. So if I make it through the first year (still actively doing stuff), they will definitely see much less revenue from folks like me (I bought the Archeum Chainbreaker pack which provided 5000 credits). And their ongoing challenge is going to be convincing folks like myself who gave them (especially the former Trion ArcheAge team who were retained) the benefit of the doubt (only to see them fail again), to give them another chance where it will result in the resumption of spending money (via the purchase of credits). Some of the positives noted above are only a starting point (they have a long way to go to even earn back what little trust I had).
