Over the course of this week, we’ve been covering the ongoing Gamigo clownshow: The company suffered layoffs it didn’t disclose, which took out the last remaining RIFT community manager; it announced it was shuttering four MMOs and shunting two of them back to their original developer and two to a brand-new Bulgarian indie company with no experience hosting MMOs; and it deleted Fractured Online from its website, prompting speculation that it had broken off publishing Dynamight’s Kickstarted sandbox as well – none of which had been addressed by Gamigo or Dynamight in spite of press inquiries. Until today.
While Gamigo has stayed true to form with no public announcements, Dynamight Studios has chosen the last moment right before the holidays to admit that it’s “facing troubles with [its] third-party backend platform” which is “responsible for managing game servers.” Consequently, the team says, the game will leave early access and go back into closed development, with the servers effectively offline while the platform transition takes place.
“We are already at work on a new platform to replace the existing one and will be releasing a schedule for its completion in January. Luckily, just a small portion of the dev team is engaged on this task, while everyone else just keeps working on the game as usual. This means that once we can host servers again, you are going to find plenty of additions and improvements to Fractured Online! Just to give you some hints on what to expect, our current focus is on player retention and quality of life / bug fixes. Regarding the former, we are finalizing features such as the Journey System, a quest/achievement hybrid to guide players past the tutorial, and ability level-up. As for the latter, we have over 200 tasks touching topics such as controls, combat, latency, client and server performance, balancing, points of interest, city sieges, and more. Several of these tasks have already been completed, but we haven’t been able to release a new build of the game. This means you are going to get them all at once in the largest patch in the history of Fractured Online! As soon as the situation has stabilized, we are also going to publish a detailed development roadmap for 2023.”
Dynamight keeps using the word “platform” in a vague way here, never quite stating that its relationship with Gamigo has been severed. Studio boss Jacopo Gallelli finally surfaced in Discord to clarify that the problem isn’t the engine (it’s a SpatialOS game), but he doesn’t come right out and blame Gamigo or even acknowledge that the two have split up.
“I know it’s very vague,” he writes. “As you can imagine, there are (legal) reasons we are being vague. Hopefully the developers of the platform will soon go public about the topic.” But he also insists that the situation “has nothing to do with the Gamigo layoffs” as the “tech wasn’t built for nor operated by Gamigo.” Nowhere in the missive or Discord does Gallelli or the Dynamight team explain Gamigo’s removal of the game from its website, which was the reason for the concern in the first place; in fact, Gallelli says he didn’t even know it had happened until players in Discord told him this morning.
According to Gallelli, the game’s server will be wiped and sales have halted. “Things are going to change massively communication-wise next year,” he promises.
No statements about early access refunds have been made as of publication time.
Gallelli continues to post in Discord even as we’re going to print with this news, so there’s probably more to come as this is the first direct blast of information we’ve gotten about the game in over a month.
