Remember back at the end of 2020, when Gamigo began rather obviously to divest itself of most of its publishing agreements and video games, along with a large portion of its staff? At the time, the company cut ties with Aura Kingdom and Grand Fantasia, sending them to developer to X-LEGEND, and ejected Shaiya and Last Chaos, chucking them off to Fawkes Games. Not long after that, Fractured and Gamigo split up (and we still don’t have the whole story there on the record, though we can guess). Either way, it had cut Gamigo down to just a handful of MMORPGs, most notably Trove, RIFT, Fiesta Online, and the KingsIsle games Wizard101 and Pirate101.
Well, apparently Gamigo found a few more browser games hiding in its closet and has now decided to kick them to the curb too – specifically, Desert Operations and Wargame 1942. Both games technically shut down today after just two weeks of notice, but both will also soft-land with Fawkes Games, like Shaiya and Last Chaos, so at least they’ll stay online somewhere.
We dug into Bulgaria-based Fawkes Games back in 2022; it represented itself as a newish indie indie games servicing studio that was “shifting into full operations,” though there never was much information. The current website bears a 2023 copyright and still refers to the Shaiya and Last Chaos migrations from a year and a half ago as “upcoming.” The news blog, however, has been somewhat consistently updated with what appears to be Shaiya patch info (it’s not actually labeled anywhere).
In any case, the key update on Fawkes’ website involves the migration process for Desert Ops and Wargame, which according to the page still isn’t live. However, if we’re reading Gamigo’s post correctly, an account reconnection token was sent to players in-game over the last two weeks and can’t be retrieved now that the servers are down, and you’ll need it to migrate, so… we guess we hope you weren’t on vacation and missed that memo in the last two weeks because it kinda looks as if you’re out of luck and your old account is gone forever, with just two weeks of notice. Then again, you play a Gamigo game, so you’re probably used to this sort of thing.
“The closure process will begin on July 1st, during which time the game will no longer be accessible. Since we care very much about your privacy and information, we have not shared any of your personal details to Fawkes Games during the transfer of the game, if you decide to continue with your game account, you’ll need a personal token to re-connect your account in the new server/page and continue right where you left it. You will receive this token via INGAME message soon, make sure to SAVE IT in your PC, since you will not be able to reach the message after July 1st and without it you will not be able to recover your game account and progress.”
Ooof. Anyhow, at least these games were saved from a full sunset, but it’s not a great look.
