Gamigo game shutdowns, Layoffs, and the future of Rift

This has been a week of unexpected excitement, and not in the good way. The revelation of layoffs within the Rift team, and transfer of development away from designers that have working knowledge of the toolset tolls the coming of the end. What follows is a discussion of events and research written by Doranbolt@Typhiria, a past contributor to The Ghar Station. Thank you Doran for your research and contributions!

As always, you can join in the discussion of Rift on both The Ghar Station Discord and on the Rift focused Heroes of Telara Discord.  Please follow us on twitter @TheGharStation. We are also now on Patreon!

This piece was submitted by Doranbolt@Typhiria and edited by The Ghar Station for formatting.

Gamigo announced on February 23 that, alongside some other games, they were shutting down Defiance and Defiance 2050 on April 29th. Among the games that were originally published by Trion, ArcheAge, Rift and Trove will be the only games that are still running. According to a comment by Youtube user TheCursedBirth on a recent review of Defiance 2050, development had stopped since the acquisition.

Comment from video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrMqzPj31jo

The game stopped receiving support after the studio was purchased by Gamigo 2 years ago, then proceeded to lay off more then 70% of the staff. The only people working on the game are there for server maintenance, and the occasional event which there’s only like 6 of. The game is so much fun and there’s a huge amount of content in it and that’s good because there hasn’t been any new content in 2 years. Gamigo has a history of buying games and keeping them alive just to milk them for microtransactions. Its a shame, the only real way were going to see more content is if another company buys the game and takes a leap of faith and invest resources into it.

This week we find out that around the same time, Rift’s Acalos (Product Manager) and Kerilar (Designer) were laid off. Both of them still hang out on the Heroes of Telara community discord and Kerilar has commented on his layoff, not taking it too hard and sharing what he worked on before he was laid off.

Had fun back on Rift, will of course miss working on it. Sadly because of the pc trouble and the storm, the Mega dragon Dim items for Carnival didnt make it in and Planar Incursions are, well, someone elses’ headache now! Best of luck to the team and to all of you!

After hearing the news about Defiance, community member Darkageman asked for a reaction from Community Management, fearing that Rift would shut down as well. The response was late enough to also comment on the layoffs. http://forums.riftgame.com/general-discussions/general-discussion/514370-defiance-defiance-2050-shutting-down-rift-next-12.html#post5405597

Hey everybody, let me briefly address your biggest concern(s): Rift is not going to be shut down! Most of you already noticed and pointed out a change in internal structures. While we’re not able to publicly address or communicate about those changes in detail, we can assure you that there will be a team responsible for and working on Rift (future development being part of this). If there are still any concerns or worries left about that topic, please feel free to PM one of the CMs at any time. We’ll close this thread by answering the thread’s title (Is Rift Next ?) with a clear NO! Best wishes, Elariok

In Rift, the current team of Community Managers usually only interact with the community when they have a clear reason to do so. If the response isn’t to an outage, then replies are usually well-crafted messages that serve certain goals.

This reply aims to suppress publicly visible discussion as the the thread was locked and players are asked to send PMs of any one the CMs to express their concerns. It also tries to reassure players by acknowledging the changes but pointing out that support for Rift will remain, even explicitly hinting at future development.

While this may sound hopeful, no time frame is given and no assurances are given that new staff will be assigned to make up for this loss. The post presents players with a plan that is to be executed later (“will be”) and as we all know, plans take time can change. Without the knowledge of the toolset any new team will have to overcome a steep learning curve that is common to game development. For a game of Rift’s complexity, the ramp up time without experts is likely to be a long uphill climb.

So what is next? In terms of updates, Gamigo CMs have informed the community on discord that they will be releasing Carnival to celebrate Rift’s 10th birthday by the end of March. This will be delivering on what has been prepared already, and certain dimension rewards that were developed by Kerilar are unlikely to be available.

Future content updates would require content to be designed and as far as we know Rift only has one known active designer. Until Gamigo starts adding designers, future content such as the completion of Planar Incursions is unlikely to happen. The only known public-facing dev remaining, Worgoroth, would likely be able to add items to the store and work on battle pass releases. If he is the only designer, expectations for quantity of content should be very low.

Will Rift close down? While Gamigo says no, we have seen what happened to Defiance. If Rift is now in a similar position, it may survive a few more years without new content before eventually being closed down. Things can always turn around and Gamigo may at some point decide to invest in new content, but if we look at the way Gamigo operates as a company this seems unlikely. Long term content plans would not include laying off the only developer that has deep knowledge of the game, then replacing him with a another developer that does not have anyone to help him get familiar with the game systems and development tools.

Holyroller also has a post up on the forums detailing what is next for Rift. Please take the time to read it here: http://forums.riftgame.com/general-discussions/general-discussion/514558-whats-next-rift.html#post5405778