XLGAMES and Gamigo say paid DLC will make up for ‘deficiencies’ in ArcheAge Unchained’s launch

It would seem that XLGAMES and Gamigo are going with the “set off an explosion” approach to dousing community fires. As we reported last week, ArcheAge Unchained‘s Western publisher decided to stealth-slap a price tag on the upcoming Garden of the Gods expansion when the prevailing assumption – fueled by the game’s own PR and interviews and announcements – was that Unchained was a onetime purchase and that future expansions would continue to be free. But this past Friday, one of the game’s community managers penned yet another explanation for the business model shift on the official forums, stating that the rocky launch of Unchained is the reason for the purchase price for Garden of the Gods.

“After Unchained was released, we experienced several shortcomings of the ArchePass system, which everyone is all too aware of at this point. Regrettably, the service did not fully recover from those early flaws. Still, we are committed to ensuring that Unchained operates with sustainability in mind.

“There were statements made last year at the release of Unchained addressing how future content would be delivered. At the time, these comments reflected how we theorized the future would unfold. Due to the deficiencies mentioned it was important for us to pivot to a retail expansion approach to continue sustaining the title.”

Those shortcomings, readers will recall, caused the devs to disable the ArchePass two different times and caused no small number of headaches for players as a result of various bugs and exploits. There were even issues with compensation for the ArchePass’ downtime. Now, it would seem that the players will be paying for all of those problems in a quite literal sense.