If you’ve been worried about the future of Star Trek Online, Neverwinter, or Champions Online recently… well, who can blame you? It’s been a weird time for the games with Embracer in flames, Gearbox about to be sold off, and Cryptic being shunted off to a tiny European branch of the company. This is why players will be relieved to see that Cryptic CEO Phil Frazier dropped a post on the subreddit for STO to say… hello.
It would be wrong to characterize the whole thing as nothing but good news, but it’s also not a ton of bad news; Frazier confirms that the studio is moving operations, which of course we already knew, but he also reassures fans that there are no plans to shutter the three games at this time.
Furthermore, he states that the plan is to still put out content updates for the games at a reliable cadence (we imagine that’s mostly for the games that are not Champions Online here, given that game’s update cadence), although it is possible for plans to change. There are people who have chosen to leave the studio given the instability, but the post is made with full knowledge of that fact.
“Please note that I specifically asked our teams to remain quiet on this topic until we had more of our ducks in a row related to this transition,” he writes.
“Yes – things are changing. We’re in the process of transitioning our business to DECA. This process is quite involved and has broad implications on the development of the game, issues related to publishing, etc… We still haven’t fully resolved all of the complexities but we’re making great progress with the team at DECA. I’d like to make two major points. 1: Star Trek: Online (plus Neverwinter and Champs) are not being sunset as part of this transition. The primary goal driving this change is to better position all of these titles for continued development into the future. Our shared ambition with DECA is that these games live on for many years to come. 2: The plan, as of writing this, is to maintain a steady state w/r/t our content cadence and mix. This could change over time as the business evolves, but right now we’re pushing to keep things as they are. With any change as significant as this, it’s possible there will be challenges that impact things down the road. We still have a great team at Cryptic, and a growing team at DECA, trying to mitigate risks as best we can. All staff at Cryptic are fully looped-in on the process and as you all have noted in a few threads, some of our team have decided to proactively find other work. Game studios see people come and go all the time, and with as much internal transparency as we’re providing into the process, I fully support and celebrate folks taking whatever steps they need to be where they want to be.”
So obviously this isn’t a perfect scenario with nothing to even consider fretting about, but it’s good to see that at least right now it’s full steam ahead.
The news comes even as Gearbox – which includes the remains of PWE not associated directly with Cryptic – is on the verge of being sold off after months of rumors.
