MMOBomb has an interview up with Gamigo’s top brass today that has some interesting nuggets for MMO players wondering about the current state of the company and all the MMORPGs it scooped up from an apparently failing Trion Worlds back in 2018.
While many of the excellent questions lobbed by the publication’s Mike Byrne are dodged or met with the same party line Gamigo reps have been repeating now for months (particularly those regarding communication and staffing and the state of the lesser-known titles), Gamigo does say that it “reached an agreement” with XL Games on ArcheAge last month and has actually grown the ArcheAge team in particular. Mervin Lee Kwai, one of the key Trion folks to survive the layoffs, also says that Gamigo has “re-hired a dozen previous employees who were displaced during the transition and have plans to rebuild each team over 2019,” though he admits large expansions aren’t happening for the games in the short-term, so instead the teams are working on “sustainable” content and “smaller, more frequent updates” in the first half of this year.
That apparently includes a major revamp of the games’ monetization. “We’ll do that by evaluating our business models and phasing out some of the older, aggressive micro-transactions along with reducing the reliance on lockboxes,” Kwai says. “Instead, we’ll focus on selling the service and optional objective rewards through modern, hybridized models.”
MMO fans will also recall that last year Trion bought up what was left of Gazillion’s assets, including the buyables from the Marvel Heroes collapse in 2017. Gamigo confirms that those assets were part of its Trion deal and that it’s “currently evaluating” their value, but it has little to say about them otherwise.
