I think a "butchery company" would be a better term than a "graveyard company." The games don't go there to die, they go there to be killed and carved to the bone for every scrap they can get out of them. Then discard the broken bones and find a new one.
this company just bought Wizard101 and Pirate101. Everybody in the community is excited for it because they are expecting a lot more content in both games due to the investment. I have doubts about that content after seeing this video though.
@@Sb129 What has Gamigo done for Fiesta over the years? I quit in 2012, and popped my head back in for a few weeks in 2016 when they made level 1-60 easier. There been any new content? At all??
@@bestaround3323 its certainly not getting any worst, worst case scenario the games stay with the same shitty p2w monetization it was already getting before gamigo got it.
The most sinister thing: Gamigo itself can easily be replaced. The moment too much players realise that being bought by gamigo is a death sentence to their favourite game and they stop playing immediately, the Gamigo strategy stopps to work. When that happens the investors just sell gamigo and create a new company with a new name that does exactly the same thing but it will take years until the players realise it again.
I think it's not THAT easy to drop Gamigo for 2 reasons - most players won't stop immediately stop playing the game that they're heavily committed to and maybe addicted to, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it will be strip-mined, and there is a degree of talent in stripping a game for the maximum possible profit
@@porkch0mp538 an alternative could be a patreon group of gamers coming together to raise the funds to purchase back these games from companies like that and massively crowdfund them on life support to get them back up and running with their staff as intact as possible for awhile. eventually those crowd funds will be less and less necessary if these games actually are profitable which the initial patreon investors can get profit off of by selling the newly revived games back to companies that will actually take care of the now long term profitable games... the problem is i, and i assume most gamers, do not trust any large group like that to actually do so ethically without becoming exactly like gamigo or other companies like them. in fact id imagine that a lot of these companies probably didnt start off the way they are now. maybe initially intending to revive games for long term, and implementing cash shop features as a short term means of generating the profit needed to reinvest into the game... but eventually realizing just how much profit they can make off this games dedicated and initially grateful community and allowing greed to take over.
@@porkch0mp538 If a game is generating negative revenue, it's already dying, it's just doing it slowly and painfully. It can probably be turned around, but it's near impossible. I can quite assure you that no company sells a game to gamigo if they think they can salvage it in any way and come out of it with profit and a game generating profit. The moment a company decides that they need to sell the game to gamigo implies that for some reason the game is so fucked that it can't feasibly generate profit in a realistic time frame and it's better to just cut their losses and get at least some more money out of it while they still can, while still retaining their credibility. And dreams and visions just simply don't pay the bills if there's no public interest and money behind it.
@@Septimus_ii I really didn't want to drop Wizard101 as I enjoyed the game. However, even before it was acquired, I knew it had serious monetization issues as I spent so much money on its cash shop with the booster cards. :(
Gamigo bought out Trion Worlds (owner of Rift, Defiance, ArcheAge and another previously-insanely-successful, now-dying game called Trove) on October 22, 2018. Trion Worlds had insanely hard staff cutbacks almost immediately, and then was *completely disbanded* on October 28, 2018. They lasted six days. *SIX.*
I'm rewatching this video, and I saw this comment and just felt sadness. Trove was by far my absolute favorite MMO RPG. I still play it from time to time. I sank probably around 1000 hours across the Xbox One release and Steam versions. I don't regret any of that time, but I find it hard to even touch the game anymore. Sure there is a ton of new content, but it feels excessively grindy and pay to win. The Paragon system specifically is what broke me. Needing to grind levels PAST max level in order to get the items required to make and maintain a very expensive end game upgrade, with the exp requirements becoming far and far too much as it goes on, since you can only get the necessary loot to maintain a crystal ring from paid loot boxes, or grinding to a paragon level that is a prime number. So as time goes on, it will become virtually impossible to refresh that crystal ring without spending a lot of money to refresh the ring ability every 2 weeks or so.
I know someone who went through the hiring process at Gamigo just to be ghosted at the final steps. They put on a big show but it's clear their workplace is very toxic. On one hand they will fly you to Germany to their head office to "learn the culture", but on the other hand you work with a constant fear of layoffs or reorganizing, get demonized by the playerbases of games, and occasionally have super angry German drill sergeants come and yell at you all day for not meeting expectations (which is IMPOSSIBLE due to their business practices that this video outlines). Gamigo is as much a trap for developers as it is for games.
I actually know someone who worked at the company. Lets just say it's a sexist workplace and they actively fight to make the game worse even with their own employees try to explain its bad. The culture is disgusting, the attitudes of the higher level employees is an "i know better than you" and they don't care.
~10 years ago they killed my favorite bulletin board. It only took months, within like 1 week they banned all they previous moderators and within 4 weeks they banned all the core users including me. Offense that got you banned reached up into telling other people via private message about successors. Which startet shortly after it became clear they just banned everyone who even dared to ask questions. After less then a year they shut it down completely. There had already be no new content for years except for some new user asking questions no one ever answered because no one was left to do so.
Kingsile recently admitted that they had to grovel to get gamigo to allow continued work on pirate101, despite this being one of gamigo’s broadcasted goals for their purchase of kingsisle. The first thing gamigo approved was cosmetic items that require money to buy. This is a terrible sign for my two favorite mmos
Don't put money on anything that entirely depends on someone else's computer to run. That goes for literally every MMO btw, MMOs in concept are cancer, unnecessary and only there for the socially deprived to feel important, aka catering to the mentally unstable just like the service.
Pirate 101 was dead from the launch date. Barely anyone plays the game and you can barely get passed level 7 with out a pay wall slightly more expensive than wizard101. At least with wizard101, (and I've tested this on a burner email) it is possible to get to level 20 without paying a dime. Gamigo drops games that cannot sustain themselves and compared to pirate 101, wizard101 literally could be left alone for a year and will still make millions
I'm so immensely pissed off by gaming's handling. I want to note that not only had they promised ot keep Trion properties ALIVE, but had promised that they would give new, plot continuing content. The summary of their involvement is half-hearted at best, and money-mongering at worst. I will be so absolutely heartbroken if Rift is similarly broken for its parts. For shame, Gamigo
I'm sad. I loved defiance and them doing a "graphical redo" had me so excited. Then it came out and not only reset all progress, but added huge cash grabs and barely had better graphics and ran MUCH worse. The whole player base went back to the OG defiance (of course) and then gamigo got it. The game got put immediately into lifesupport mode. Such a fun game with good story, fun gameplay, fun raids (my first 50+ person raid was in this game on PS3) and cool ablities. Too bad it died, R.I.P DEFIANCE.
Btw, I still haven't found a mmo with the same fps style gunplay + unique weapon loadouts (like a roguelikes). Wish someone would make one because man that game was so fun.
Gamigo is basically a vulture capitalism firm, they buy projects that are in decline and milk them dry, then toss out the corpse. I'd advise anyone who plays an MMO that gets sold to Gamigo to immediately stop spending money on it and continue playing f2p, if you enjoy the game at all. Idk about others, but a big part of my decision to spend on cash shops comes from whether I feel the game's monitization systems are ethical and whether it's a company I want to support, and present day Gamigo would always fail that test.
The very first game i spent money on, was League of Legends. Back then we just didn't have any kind of good F2P PvP game that wasn't P2W. League came in, gave us a nice gameplay experience, constant updates and balance changes, even some free RP and skins thanks to events, and much more. I gladly started spending money on a monthly basis in their store since i already had hundreds of hours of good experience. Another example was Black Desert Online. I didn't quite like the in-game shop and subscription having already paid for the base game, but the game was nice and enjoyable nevertheless, so I only spent money there once. I don't really get why people pre-purchase games or throw money away without testing the water first. I haven't even considered buying Final Fantasy XIV until they expanded the F2P experience.
@@Flo_JustFloo They just opened up a "fresh start" server for runes of magic.... Ontop of that there are exclusive end game titles with endgame STATs on them that only one person can get, this was fashioned so that whales spend a ton in the cash shop just to be the one to get that title in each catagory. All the while the game is broken, raids have so many bugs, enemies literally fall through maps etc. So nah gameforge aint really better.
@@Flo_JustFloo gameforge trying? damn. do you actually play anything of theirs? :/ gameforge are right up there at the top of Worst of the Worst, along with Gamigo and a few others. pure corporate garbage with zero interest in the games or players. their business model is very much alike Gamigos.
This makes Nexon, NCSoft, Trion, and other companies look like decent companies despite their business models sadly. You might as well make a series of "MMOs that are dead or going to die because Gamigo now owns them" series.
@@cgirl111 oh im aware I had to explain that to a rift fanboy earlier But at least NCSoft puts effort in while milking shit Even Wildstar was actually worked on until it died Rip wildstar
I can only imagine the person that convinced marketing to contact you about making a video for them was actually a really pissed developer at gamigo, who wanted exactly what happened.
As a person who spent her entire teenage years with numerous MMORPGs I am heartbroken to see them in the hands of such selfish corporates which sucks their blood till the last drop. Many of those games could’ve been still serviceable even for today’s standard because not everything is graphics. Thanks for mentioning these! I am genuinely relieved to see many other people thinks so, thanks to your content and the comment section. Keep up the good work 🙏 Cheers!
@@ih7729 lol I didn't. read it again. "thanks to.." is used as "through" in that sentence. Having to admit your illiteracy is indeed amusing. Nice try!
When you mentioned Wizard101, I skipped a beat... If there's any game I cannot see falling, it's definitely games like Wizard101. I seriously would sign a petition against Gamigo's influence if it breaks such childhood games.
It hurts me so much that Fiesta has been brutally murdered by Gamigo. Fiesta used to have this really nice starting town and a really active community. Then OutSpark died and Gamigo grabbed up the game and just destroyed it. They killed what I would have considered being a pretty great game at one point.
@@MercyMO2 I might have to look into that tbh. Gamigo didn't just put fiesta on life support, they actively went out of their way to fuck up literally everything.
@@PinkAgaricus So i just looked that up, and apparently Aeria Games actually merged with Gamigo. I remember it being kind of a meme to call them "Old Man Aeria Games" so I guess Gamigo finally put them in a retirement home.
While watching this I booted up a game I hadn't played in a while just to be greeted by the gamigo logo and I'm pretty sure we live in a simulation now
@@ThatDangBee probably. I'm thinking about making a game SIMILAR (NOT a copy/ripoff) to trove (without the crap) because it saddens me to see it die sine Gamigo bought it. My long term goal would be to open-source it in a way so that developers and artists in the community could improve the game
I love how Wizard101 was the only one or one of the few games he praised on the *Worst MMO Ever* series. Really shows how good the game is. I also returned last year, enjoy it my friend
Said this in another comment, but I don’t think anyone there knew/knows about the history of this company. This video got posted there though and it’s spreading more awareness.
I don‘t think they care at all tho honestly More like: -did he swallow our bait? -no -ah okay check for the other 2 million we asked Anyway back to marking settlements...
At worst, it's "negative reinforcement" in driving the business lens of "any interest is good interest." At best, er. Worst (for the CEO's, **Not** the Customer.) It's "I'm now gonna dodge any-and-all games with Gamigo on the title."
Archage was my favorite game when it first released, it was incredible i still havent found another game that does classes like it. I remember i stopped playing because they began locking off features behind a paywall that were previously simply apart of the game. Sad
I'm glad I saw this as well just after watching your Wizard101 review, as I was previously very hopeful for the future of the game. Now, however, I am completely crushed that Wizard101, a game I actually grew up with, is likely going to die now. I wish there was something I could have done to stop this, and I know many of my friends would say the same, along with many other players. I'll try to enjoy it while it lasts, and hope it lasts for a long time, however I don't see that happening anymore. Despite how sad this made me, thank you very much, Josh, for waking me up to the reality of the situation. I'll try to spread the word and share your video to my friends, content creators and some of the Kingsisle dev staff that I am in contact with. I doubt anything can or will be done, but at least the word about Gamigo can be spread.
I still play Fiesta sometimes just for the nostalgia. I was never a casher even back in 2008 cuz my mom didn't let me buy stuff. But back then even non-cashers could lvl up fine. Now?? It's impossible. It's unbalanced and a lot of players are a bunch of mercenaries charging gold to help in dungeons like Crystal Castle, Dragon's Tomb ou Izyel. The game is dead sadly. Every single player I talk who is nice says that only plays for nostalgia
@@gbzebs most of the community has moved on to private servers. Pretty much everyone on those is well acquainted with the game and is playing for nostalgia. Much better experience imo with much less p2w
Miss playing fiesta out on 2013 days saturday specifically farming silver ores in cave of wind, worth more than have today some stuff in there and won't play cuz I'm busy in stuff or simply have no energy to play fiesta in a DEAD server.
Had "pleasure" being introduced to Gamigo via Trove, a nieche voxel sandbox MMO. The game after the release used to have a massive playerbase with activity raching top spots on steam. However, after years of development Trion, the creators of the game, started to struggle financially, since they decided to push for more microtransactions instead of quality updates which led to a decrease in playerbase and very infrequent updates. It all came down to Trion being sold to Gamigo. Did Gamigo try to fix the situation? Absolutely not, they stick to the same schedule of very infrequent updates and same monitesation (monitesation in that game was very forgiving, there were only a few things you couldn't obtain via playing the game and trading). Now the game proceeds to be in stagnation. I left it years ago, all my clanmates, or at least most of them, including the guild master did too, mind you we were literally the largest CIS clan (clubs they were called) and one of the top, at least 10 I believe if not 3, overall. Nothing changed since then and that's so unfortunate, the game had so much potential you can't imagine.
hey ma, it's me!! (points at the patreon list) (i'm pepperoni pizza haha) i've been wondering this for a while, but would you ever consider doing a video about the process of an mmo dying? like what kind of factors lead to it, what the signs are like, etc., before they're acquired by a company like gamergo? i think that would be really fascinating. love your videos!
I just love how Gamigo always states, "The games could not sustain itself." NO SHIT! YOU NEED TO SPEND THE MONEY TO KEEP THE GAME FRESH AND FUN. It's not a fuckin' living, breathing creature that can hunt for food and survive. If you leave a game to 'survive,' it slowly starves and eventually 'dies'. It needs the care of a development team to keep it going.
I think the best way way to look at it is domestic dogs VS. Wolves. Gamification thinks that their games are Wolves, who can hunt and sustain themselves, when they’re more like Domesticated Dogs who can live for a much longer time but only if you put the love, care, treatment, and money into them.
@@NameInWorkshop I think zoos are a better analogy. You see this animal in the wild hear how people love it, then decide to put it in an exhibit for people to pay to see it. Like a tiger. Then you start adding all these extra costs to see the tiger, raking in more money. But at no point do you invest in the tigers quality of life. It's stuck in a small cage, it's caretakers have no idea how to take care of it or how to properly feed it. And even if they did they don't have the budget. The tiger is stressed, grows ill, but the zoo won't pay a veterinarian to make it better. And eventually the tiger dies. The zoo claims the tiger just didn't have the ability to take care of itself, but in reality the tiger was doing just fine in the wild, thriving even, until you decided to exploit it to death, and sell off its pelt to collectors and its bones to people who think they hold medicinal properties. Not taking a dig at zoos, just an analogy.
I disagree with this. If a game is "mature" in it's content, you don't need monthly updates. The player base will provide the content for each other as long as you don't mess it up and just focus on moderating and bug fixes, with an occasional bone in a (preferably QA tested) update thrown here and there. Would World of Warcraft do great with another expansion? Probably. Can it do fine if it doesn't get an update in three years from Blizzard. It just might. Would EVE Online have been fine if Athanors were never introduced and moon goo was done by POSes still and the venture was never made a thing, forcing people to mine in destroyers until they got a barge? Probably. It didn't need the "noob ship" for the first 10 years, it could have gone fine without it for another 10. A mature game will do great with lots investment, but it doesn't need a while lot more than survival mode staff as long as the bosses don't fuck up what was good. You can look in your steam library and probably fine some multiplayer games that could have used some updates, but also some great games that got their last update more than a decade ago. Besides the fact is, even if they wanted to copy Blizzard... they aren't Blizzard. Internally, they don't know how to do big budget stuff and I doubt their HR even knows how to separate the good from the okay talent. Obviously pushing things on the cash shop, not doing things like bug fixing, and pushing untested updates will cause the game to crash and burn, but games don't need to grow to survive or even grow to stay good. As long as they keep things nice for the original player base, word of mouth can allow a constant moderately profitable stream of revenue that might not be the next World of Warcraft, but is sustainable. What's odd to me is that "survival mode, but don't fuck it up and kill the goose" doesn't involve much risk (since you rely mostly on the built in code) and probably earns back itself in 3 years over the aggressive cash shop route but the still do this.
And these devs taking care of the game and "sustaining" it have to be paid. Which means the game HAS to bring in some money and revenue...it always baffles me when I see gamers complain how companies do DLCs or MTX instead of just pouring money in the game and hope for the best. Josh says it: risk. Risk is not soemthing you just shrug away... Not much into MMOs - but I am a total war fan. And so often I see "fans" complain about faction DLC, Lordpack-DLCs etc - "they should just release a complete game!" - yeah, sure...and sell the game that is in development then for ten years for 400 € to get the money back? Delusional ideas some gamers have about how money works...
Thanks for the heads up Josh, a major amount of my community play these games, we thought it was bad back in the old days with Trion, always wondering, now I know and so do they. Never change Josh, don't you ever change.
Atlas Reactor was a small game but a fun and unique game. It didn't get advertised nearly enough as most of the people found it by word of mouth. when gamigo bought trion the first thing I remember was the announcement that they would shut down the game. then about a year later they say Atlas would be returning as Atlas Rogues. At first I thought cool a rogue lite in the Atlas universe this is gonna be fun, and it came out and they basically removed everything that made Atlas unique and made it a bootleg X-Com game... and since of course that didn't make enough money in the first few months even tho it was a beta and again 0 advertising. They have now shut that down. Gamigo is seriously the worst company I've ever seen.
I remember when I started Fiesta , it still belonged to the previous company and it was quite good back then. When Gamigo took over, they didn't do nothing, they changed things, but to the worse. Now it's just solo grinding, because the mobs are so much easier to kill that you don't need partners until high level . The King Quests are no longer visited ( although you get good items out of it ) because you get a lot more XP from the quests + grinding now that you quickly grow out of level for the KQs. Basically they took out all the social stuff off the game.
Your channel is such a gem, I hope someday you get the recognition you deserve, until then, please don’t stop doing theses videos, I know I’ll never stop watching them, you’re helping me through some confusing times, I really appreciate it man, and I don’t even play any MMO’s as of right now (I come and go with theses games). Thanks man, loved the vid
I quite literally just heard this from JSH and it hurts my soul. I love Wizard101, it was my first ever MMO, and it was there for me when I was going through some of the worst years of my life. Seeing the game fall into the hands of these greedy, slimy money-grubbing corporate suits is just fucking tragic.
Then boom gamingo and trion not caring for it anymore. I couldn't take one more second of waiting 20 years for a block to load due to the trash servers making the game almost unplayable because they removed shadow tower for some stupid delve thing.
Wait... Trove ? The cubic mmo where you can build your own "base" to craft and upgrade your shit with mounts and loads of self generated worlds ? That Trove ?
I was instantly reminded of Total biscuit the first time I saw a video of yours a few weeks back. Am now subscribed and love the videos. Keep up the awesome work mate. :)
Another tradgedy of the genre: When an MMO gets shut down, that's it. When a single-player game stops being supported, it's still playable. If companies were required to release the source code, both client and server, when they stop supporting a program, their former customers who actually liked it could do the support work themselves. Not to mention that when the likes of Gamigo kill a game, the fans could patch out all the crap that was introduced to kill the game.
I think at the very least, if a company does not have any plans to copy, distribute, sell, or otherwise use an IP in a country or region at all for the foreseeable future, they should lose protections for that intellectual property. I think this makes sense, if they don't intend to monetize or otherwise make use of something, why not let others use it?
@@RegalRoyalWasTaken The name rings a bell, but I'm not sure if I've actually watched any of it. Probably just a case of two people having a similar philosophy.
@@lorscarbonferrite6964 US trade laws are weird. If a company doesn't actively protect their IPs, eventually the courts view that as neglect and stop allowing them to keep their IPs. I'm not saying they have to be Disney level shit where they're suing a kid who drew mickey, but if they're not actively protecting the IPs they start losing all of them.
There's literally a term for this in the studio. It's called sunsetting the game, just ride the wave, set up perpetual milking mechanisms and stop fixing bugs
13:05 this is my favourite bit. Every MMO out there will have their rabid fans who have invested so much into the game they are unwilling to let go, who will defend the game to it's death.
kind of a late reply by this point but, have you heard of RAID: Shadow Legend! Quite literally the very embodiment of that business practice at its finest.
@@Luckeux The reason youtubers pump Raid: Shadow Legends so hard is they pay very well for advertising their games. There's a lot of companies that are sketchy about paying content creators on social media, but Raid: Shadow Legends and that wallet making company always pay on time and well.
@@CrashB111 I mean, I know. I'm not criticizing any youtuber banking in on that either, I'm glad they can get extra dough anywhere really. But still, that shit's prime meme material.
@@Luckeux yeah thats another thing about gamigo, even if josh accepted it, they wouldnt have paid or paid very little lol, raid on the other hand actually pays, thats why i never angry at youtubers who shill for raid, they have ulube to fight for demonitization already. and yeah i once even installed raid on a sponsored link...deinstalled after 30 min, it was so generic...
@@CrashB111 Any time you see tons and tons and tons of youtubers advertising a product, it makes sense to assume the company is spending its money on ads instead of on developing the product itself. All unpaid coverage of those companies (Raid, Raycon earbuds, NordVPN) that I've seen has described them as inferior to similar products. As long as viewers know to take the ads with a grain of salt then everything is fine, but that would defeat the purpose of advertising in the first place.
This is a painfully fantastic videos that hurts to hear but is good to take in. Gamigo has bought a few games I love not long ago and it's incredible to see and hear after watching them all change with the new launches like archeage. Great video.
I died inside, when you hovered over Atlas Rogues... for fuck sake, Atlas reactor was such a great game...sadly developed by trion... then trions games got sucked up into gamigo and all updates stopped, until it eventually was taken offline... It was unique.. it was awesome, only held back by the companies, that owned it... and the time in which it came out
speaking of spirals, Spiral Knights, developed by three rings and Sega. No real updates after 2016 apart from re-occouring seasonal events, but pumping out tons of lootboxes with new accessories to attach to your armor, which reach unrealistically high prices in the ingame market. The game started fair, the paid currency in the game is called "Energy" I think. You use it to play stages or craft. It regenerates, to a maximum of 100. You need 200, then 400, then 1000 I think to craft better gear, and "crystal energy" can be bought on top of the regular energy to be able to craft those. The premium currency, Crystal Energy can be bought with ingame money as well, from other players, which is almost too good to be true! You could also revive other players by giving them half of your hearts, but the reviving is now changed to require energy. Then they introduced lootboxes that are bought with real money only. The game is good but on a steady decline with no updates. Now that I think, I knew the game was dying back in 2015. The cash shop focus is first sign of the inevitable end, selling the ownership is the nail in the coffin. Then it's just a steady decline with no updates. And then there's roblox where you can't trade at all unless u have bought robux with irl money in the past 30 days. What a ripoff.
that's kinda it is it :p a MMO that is doing well will know their worth and wont be looking to sell. but one that is experiencing decline will be pushed by companies like to "cut their losses" andsell ot them...even if the slump is workable by doing htis the game is doomed anyway.
Why do gamigo kill mmorpgs? Umm... money! Every single mmorpg they own is literally a cash cow to them. Also they dont kill as muc as they Refurbish and make it look like its brand new. Rip archeage
Gamigo didn't kill ArcheAge or any of these other games. They bought them because they were already on a track towards dying, and they just let them do that. Same as Gameforge and a number of other garbage " "publishers".
@@Ithirahad You literally just said it yourself.. The games were DYING and Gamigo grabbed them and did the final blows, in other words, they KILLED them. lol
My favourite part of any of these videos is the bit that says "say you have a..." or "it's a bit like when you...". Mr. Hayes, your analogies are wonderful, sir.
nooo they touched Twin Saga, Eden Eternal, and Wizard101!? I didn't know anything about Gamigo until this channel but they've touched my childhood! Now its personal 😭
Thanks for another great video! I've always lived by the motto "to make money, you have to spend money". If Gamigo doesn't like risk, they shouldn't run a company. I think what Gamigo and companies like it don't get is that all of the most successful games have one thing in common: they did something new, they took a risk.
I’m glad you made this video and I hope a lot of people see it. One recommendation for your Worst MMO series, if you haven’t considered it already, Champions Online.
I was hopeful for Defiance. I was a day-one player, and watched the show with nerdy interest because the universe created truly excited me. It was sad for me when I started to realize that it wasn't going anywhere good for the game or the TV show. Oh well. You live and you learn. "A thing isn't beautiful because it lasts." -The Vision
I honestly thought Defiance was amazing when it first came out, and initially it did well but they clearly focused too much on the first 1/3rd of the game and not at all towards the later stages when almost everyone left.
I had no idea they bought Wiz until this video and now I'm a bit terrified for it. I've played it for years and actually got back into it recently trying to max out all my wizards. It will be beyond disappointing to have all that progress, money, time, and pure childhood wonder and enjoyment just get flushed down the drain
I just found your channel recently but it is obvious that you have strong principles, Josh. I love that. This video reawakened an anger against Gamigo that I forgot for so many years. I remember Outspark Fiesta. It was a lovely place for me as a kid, an imaginative world full of adventure with a wonderful community. I did not even understand what was going on at the time, but Gamigo destroyed Fiesta. Over the years I gave up on finding anything like Outspark Fiesta again. I became a lonely, cynical adult. Now I am beginning to wonder if maybe I can find something like what I had back then.
Back when I first watched this I became really concerned for Wizard101’s future. Sure the game has a ton of issues, but it’s still something I love dearly. But recently KingIsle announced that they looking to hire 70 new employees and are going to be updating Pirate101 again, so maybe things are taking a turn for the better? But then again, the last world they released reused a shit ton of assets so who knows how things are actually gonna turn out.
Firstly I'm just surprised Gamingo could muster 28 employees to unlike this video. What's the shittiest part of what Gamingo does to these games is lying to the players. Constantly. To keep us spending. Not only does the game end but could do without that kick in the balls to go with it. Last month one of their unpaid "Community Ambassadors" was telling us to "expect new content this year" on their official Discord channel. Don't you need to get paid to be a sellout? I don't even know what that'd be called. Then the whale fluffer threatened to ban me for contradicting him. But yeah, for the last year on Defiance we were told we'd be getting fixes and new content and basically "keep spending money" while they work on the game. Now we have 0 fixes and shutdown in a few weeks. They flat out lied hundreds of times to us over the last 3 years. Unforgivable greedy bastards. This vid is great and I hope anyone playing a Gamigo game somehow finds it. I can't share it on their Discord, or forum since I've been banned from both over the last 2 weeks. It needs to get put in zone chat of every one of their games. Thanks CB for sharing it on the forum, since i can't say it there.
Great vid Josh, totally agree with how Gamigo destroy every game they took over, its common knowledge at this point. That aside, which game publisher/developer out there you think is good? Basically opposite of Gamigo
Can I just say it's absolutely phenomenal seeing the growth of this channel in a year? From 40k subscribers in Jan 2021 to 354k subs in Dec 2021, JSH, you rock mate!
Hey Josh, I've just found your channel and have been loving your content. I would like to point out my disagreement with your statement at 4:39. You said that (rephrased through my understanding, forgive me if I'm wrong) if one focus on long term profit, then A and B should be relatively close. Through my experience in running family business (my family runs a restaurant so do not take my opinion highly), the ideal scenario would be to raise C (B-A=C, basically the difference between A and B) over a period of time. It is obvious that C
I am still salty about Rift and the decision to paywall one equipment slot, a slot that takes VERY VERY potent gear in them. One would think magical armors are better than earrings, but nope.
@@firedolphin7621 Pirate101 is the red-headed step-child of Wizard101; so if W101 is already getting milked for all its worth before it gets discarded, P101 is probably not even gonna get that much.
@@richardwicker8456 he left by personal choice in 2012 I think. He probably knew the game was gonna be ruined by the CEO eventually, and didn't wanna be there to see it happening
I really love how you're making your videos! Your scripts are on point! Well, that last image in the video kinda hurt me, though. Big Eden Eternal player here. Well, never paid anything in there, but that's my "childhood game" as you worded it. It's terrifying how I didn't even react when I got the mail saying the game will be shut down. Dunno which part of me accepted it... I still remember seeing people claiming Gamigo cared about the players because we had some goodies to bring into Aura Kingdom or Grand Fantasia... Games left to die, yeah, pretty much! I'm rarely listening to the news, but I had this feeling Gamigo was not a good omen for some reason! Who knows if Aeria was better! I just feel sad learning how my favourite game ever probably died. Thanks for all these explanations! =) - I'm playing on Eden Eternal Vendetta (private server), so I've always wondered if your ever thought about making a video about this game: to me, it's pretty difficult finding any real faults in it, and I really love how you look at games! Definitely a review I'd like to see before the game eventually dies for good ! -
Seeing that Fiesta footage REALLY gets my nostalgia going. Played this pretty hard for a while back when this came out about 2006 or something. But after a while Gamigo took over completely and in record time the game literally became unplayable without spending money. A Friend of mine who was in the top guild at the time and one of the top players spend upwards of 3.000 a year just to be able to actually PLAY the endgame content. If anyone is interested there are quite a few stories about HOW ridiculous this could become i could tell.
Have not heard of them and after watching your video Mr Hayes, I am glad and thankful the games wife and i love in the mmo space was never owned by this crappy shady company.
Loved the video. You should cover Aura Kingdom - definitely the best game cursed to have been purchased by Gamigo. It still has a great passionate community and is extremely active for an anime MMORPG from 2014.
One additional thing worth explicitly mentioning about the sunk cost fallacy: Spend time can count as part of the "sunk cost", and many free-to-play companies exploit that.
I feel like the real purpose of Gamigo is to do what Trion/NCSoft/etc. want to do with their declining properties while insulating those companies from the reputation hit of milking a formerly successful game and then shuttering it. Thing is, as much as it pains me to say it, most MMOs never reach the level of popularity that makes continued investment worth it. If a game does not break into the top 3 MMO tier for a sustained period of time, it will eventually require so much investment to stay current that basically any level of investment isn't worth it economically. Ultima Online, EveryQuest 1, and DaoC are still online because they broke that threshold, but games like W:AR (may it rest in peace) are not online because they failed to reach the upper echelon. If you look at Rift, it's basically going down the same path that W:AR did. It's a game that's good but not great and it never managed to capture a massive audience. Even at the point the game was sold to Gamigo, it would have required a full-game refresh to get it that audience. I'm sure hardcore Rift fans may have wanted that, but from Trion's perspective, doing so would have been Sunk-Cost Fallacy at a massive scale. But shutting the game down would have caused a major hit to Trion's reputation and undercut their pitch for future MMO's, which require players to believe that the game will not be shut down for a long time / ever. So instead, they sold the game to Gamigo and let them bleed it dry. That's not to say that what Gamigo is doing is right, though. Even if I understand their business model, I still think it would have been more ethical to just these games down and release the code to allow for fan servers rather than exploiting people's nostalgia with minimum investment. At this point, I think the best policy is to treat games purchased by Gamigo as functionally dead. Doing so can spare you the frustration of watching a game you love slowly being strangled.
"I feel like the real purpose of Gamigo is to do what Trion/NCSoft/etc. want to do with their declining properties while insulating those companies from the reputation hit of milking a formerly successful game and then shuttering it." Then what is Gameforge doing then?
These companies are just like the devil. You make a contract and get the benefits, but you lose your soul in the process and your ultimate fate its the depths of hell.
I learned my lesson with City of Heroes. I bought the game and both expansions, none of which are playable offline, not even the character creator. On top of that, I paid my monthly subscription fee for that entire period. And because I wanted to encourage them to continue creating content for the game, bought nearly every microtransaction they offered, all the seasonal costumes, the server storage for my own scenarios, my own base, everything. More hundreds of dollars than I can even remember. Then they got bought by NCSoft who decided to shut the game down, not because it wasn't profitable, but because it wasn't profitable _enough._ They figured they could use those same resources for Lineage 2 and make more money that way. They continued to sell microtransactions right up to the second they announced the closure, and simply stole everyone's money. Everything I'd invested in the game, gone. The company didn't care in the slightest about the people who had invested a decade and hundreds or thousands of dollars into the game. They knew no one was going to sue them in Korea, so they just screwed everyone over and moved on. Since City of Heroes closed, I have not spent a single penny on an MMO. Not one shiny dime. And I never will. They taught me that any money I spend on a game which relies on the goodwill of a soulless corporation is money I might as well use for toilet paper.
In case you didn't know, there are enough fans of CoH out there that you can still play it, even with some updates! Look for Homecoming and enjoy a fun time =)
Full source code for CoH's server files is available on the net ~25GB. And if you ever feel like exploring memory lane, you can play one of the private servers that were made with the leaked code.
Excellent video. I'm still playing rift (because of dimensions) but completely agree with everything you say. What drove me nuts were people I play with saying gamigo should invest into Rift to make more money. Complete lack of understanding of business costs and risk.
I can believe this. Used to play fiesta, one day I heard out out of the blue fiesta was being acquired effective immediately and the previous publisher outspark was being very shady as every game shut down with fiesta being sold. And in the other games there were in game cash shop sales before service termination and outspark disappearing.
Yep!! Last chaos here in Brasil was called last war. And was a great game w/o too much flashing animations and such comon to eastern mmo and i liked that. Also the elementalist class was cool af
Dude you just gave me a big nostalgia trip, it was pretty much the only mmo that i actually returned to after dropping it once. It had so many interesting aspects but in the end most of them were so, so poorly executed ( The split of character progression between levels and SP sounds interesting, in practice due to the piss-poor balance of SP gains people were grinding for couple months in the same dungeon with the guild exp lock). One class i think i was most interested in was the summoner elementalist, which was painful because i believe it still disconnects you from the server regularly if you use an ability at the wrong time
The saddest part of all of this is the original makers sell off the game and know this will happen. The board members and CEO are often times the killer of passionate games
I feel like Gamigo is kinda like buying a hundred Tamagotchi, doing absolutely nothing, letting them die, and saying “they couldn’t sustain themselves”.
![Runes of Tragic - The Dire State of Runes of Magic [MMOPINION]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/QMmSWOpm-wE/mqdefault.jpg)
![Have guides ruined MMO games? - [MMOPINION]](/img/n.gif)
I think a "butchery company" would be a better term than a "graveyard company." The games don't go there to die, they go there to be killed and carved to the bone for every scrap they can get out of them. Then discard the broken bones and find a new one.
If they make a rift mobile game and I’m prob going to pay thousands into it.
@@fingreen2663 Mobile gaming is a cancer that needs to be purged.
@@HallowedKhaos91 there are good mobile games
like fgo
@@HallowedKhaos91 all mobile game not cancer cancer part is stupid disgusted mobile game ads
@@keeratijirananutwinyu8339 Mobile gaming is to blame for the lazy, micro transaction filled bullcrap plaguing modern gaming, thus being a cancer.
“Hey can you review our game?”
Makes two videos that blatantly calls an evil company evil and completely shits on their products
I wonder why they don't want to work with me any more.
@@JoshStrifeHayes you’re goddamn hilarious it’s a mystery to me as well 😂
@@JoshStrifeHayes complete mystery to me.
Hahahahaha
@@PinHeadSupliciumwtf shhhhh. We do not speak about our hole outside the community.
this company just bought Wizard101 and Pirate101. Everybody in the community is excited for it because they are expecting a lot more content in both games due to the investment. I have doubts about that content after seeing this video though.
Heh, take it from a Fiesta player, they are in for a surprise and not a good one
I doubted the moment I read the acquisition text. And people were so exited "everything will get better! YAY!" 🤣
@@joroc If by better you mean worse then that is totally true
@@Sb129 What has Gamigo done for Fiesta over the years? I quit in 2012, and popped my head back in for a few weeks in 2016 when they made level 1-60 easier. There been any new content? At all??
@@bestaround3323 its certainly not getting any worst, worst case scenario the games stay with the same shitty p2w monetization it was already getting before gamigo got it.
The most sinister thing: Gamigo itself can easily be replaced. The moment too much players realise that being bought by gamigo is a death sentence to their favourite game and they stop playing immediately, the Gamigo strategy stopps to work. When that happens the investors just sell gamigo and create a new company with a new name that does exactly the same thing but it will take years until the players realise it again.
I think it's not THAT easy to drop Gamigo for 2 reasons - most players won't stop immediately stop playing the game that they're heavily committed to and maybe addicted to, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it will be strip-mined, and there is a degree of talent in stripping a game for the maximum possible profit
@@porkch0mp538 an alternative could be a patreon group of gamers coming together to raise the funds to purchase back these games from companies like that and massively crowdfund them on life support to get them back up and running with their staff as intact as possible for awhile. eventually those crowd funds will be less and less necessary if these games actually are profitable which the initial patreon investors can get profit off of by selling the newly revived games back to companies that will actually take care of the now long term profitable games... the problem is i, and i assume most gamers, do not trust any large group like that to actually do so ethically without becoming exactly like gamigo or other companies like them. in fact id imagine that a lot of these companies probably didnt start off the way they are now. maybe initially intending to revive games for long term, and implementing cash shop features as a short term means of generating the profit needed to reinvest into the game... but eventually realizing just how much profit they can make off this games dedicated and initially grateful community and allowing greed to take over.
@@porkch0mp538 If a game is generating negative revenue, it's already dying, it's just doing it slowly and painfully. It can probably be turned around, but it's near impossible. I can quite assure you that no company sells a game to gamigo if they think they can salvage it in any way and come out of it with profit and a game generating profit. The moment a company decides that they need to sell the game to gamigo implies that for some reason the game is so fucked that it can't feasibly generate profit in a realistic time frame and it's better to just cut their losses and get at least some more money out of it while they still can, while still retaining their credibility. And dreams and visions just simply don't pay the bills if there's no public interest and money behind it.
Good point.
There are many, many faceless companies like that do this in other markets as well.
@@Septimus_ii I really didn't want to drop Wizard101 as I enjoyed the game. However, even before it was acquired, I knew it had serious monetization issues as I spent so much money on its cash shop with the booster cards. :(
Gamigo bought out Trion Worlds (owner of Rift, Defiance, ArcheAge and another previously-insanely-successful, now-dying game called Trove) on October 22, 2018. Trion Worlds had insanely hard staff cutbacks almost immediately, and then was *completely disbanded* on October 28, 2018. They lasted six days. *SIX.*
I'm rewatching this video, and I saw this comment and just felt sadness. Trove was by far my absolute favorite MMO RPG. I still play it from time to time. I sank probably around 1000 hours across the Xbox One release and Steam versions. I don't regret any of that time, but I find it hard to even touch the game anymore. Sure there is a ton of new content, but it feels excessively grindy and pay to win. The Paragon system specifically is what broke me. Needing to grind levels PAST max level in order to get the items required to make and maintain a very expensive end game upgrade, with the exp requirements becoming far and far too much as it goes on, since you can only get the necessary loot to maintain a crystal ring from paid loot boxes, or grinding to a paragon level that is a prime number. So as time goes on, it will become virtually impossible to refresh that crystal ring without spending a lot of money to refresh the ring ability every 2 weeks or so.
Gamigo does reinvest thier profits, into buying more games to kill.
one day they will buy a nation and all it's infrastructure and treat it just the same... oh wait that is the IMF
@@mgntstr Umm, what was the nation that the IMF bought?
@@mgntstr I mean, before the IMF, nations settle their debt and trade deficits by declaring wars on another.
@@HO1ySh33t you mean the IMF signatories going around instigating civil unrest and regime change in nations that are holdouts is progress?
@@mgntstr Compared to full blown war? Yes.
Would you, as a civillian, rather live through civil unrest and regime change, or a war ?
I know someone who went through the hiring process at Gamigo just to be ghosted at the final steps. They put on a big show but it's clear their workplace is very toxic. On one hand they will fly you to Germany to their head office to "learn the culture", but on the other hand you work with a constant fear of layoffs or reorganizing, get demonized by the playerbases of games, and occasionally have super angry German drill sergeants come and yell at you all day for not meeting expectations (which is IMPOSSIBLE due to their business practices that this video outlines). Gamigo is as much a trap for developers as it is for games.
I actually know someone who worked at the company.
Lets just say it's a sexist workplace and they actively fight to make the game worse even with their own employees try to explain its bad. The culture is disgusting, the attitudes of the higher level employees is an "i know better than you" and they don't care.
Any boss that yells at me better have a good dental plan.
I didn't know they were German.
@@rogerwilco2 Neither did I. But as a German myself I am not surprised in the least.
~10 years ago they killed my favorite bulletin board. It only took months, within like 1 week they banned all they previous moderators and within 4 weeks they banned all the core users including me.
Offense that got you banned reached up into telling other people via private message about successors. Which startet shortly after it became clear they just banned everyone who even dared to ask questions. After less then a year they shut it down completely. There had already be no new content for years except for some new user asking questions no one ever answered because no one was left to do so.
Kingsile recently admitted that they had to grovel to get gamigo to allow continued work on pirate101, despite this being one of gamigo’s broadcasted goals for their purchase of kingsisle. The first thing gamigo approved was cosmetic items that require money to buy. This is a terrible sign for my two favorite mmos
Rip
Don't put money on anything that entirely depends on someone else's computer to run.
That goes for literally every MMO btw, MMOs in concept are cancer, unnecessary and only there for the socially deprived to feel important, aka catering to the mentally unstable just like the service.
Pirate 101 was dead from the launch date. Barely anyone plays the game and you can barely get passed level 7 with out a pay wall slightly more expensive than wizard101. At least with wizard101, (and I've tested this on a burner email) it is possible to get to level 20 without paying a dime. Gamigo drops games that cannot sustain themselves and compared to pirate 101, wizard101 literally could be left alone for a year and will still make millions
@@lasarousi what are you talking about. MMO’s are fine who fucking hurt you
@@lasarousi schizo post
I'm so immensely pissed off by gaming's handling. I want to note that not only had they promised ot keep Trion properties ALIVE, but had promised that they would give new, plot continuing content. The summary of their involvement is half-hearted at best, and money-mongering at worst. I will be so absolutely heartbroken if Rift is similarly broken for its parts.
For shame, Gamigo
I'm sad. I loved defiance and them doing a "graphical redo" had me so excited. Then it came out and not only reset all progress, but added huge cash grabs and barely had better graphics and ran MUCH worse. The whole player base went back to the OG defiance (of course) and then gamigo got it. The game got put immediately into lifesupport mode. Such a fun game with good story, fun gameplay, fun raids (my first 50+ person raid was in this game on PS3) and cool ablities. Too bad it died, R.I.P DEFIANCE.
Btw, I still haven't found a mmo with the same fps style gunplay + unique weapon loadouts (like a roguelikes). Wish someone would make one because man that game was so fun.
how much i miss defiance. A cool tv show and a nice game. Unlocking unique guns by searching for all the lore on the maps. It was a realy nice game.
I miss defiance too
And Trove
Fuck Gamigo, vengeance for Defiance.
Gamigo is basically a vulture capitalism firm, they buy projects that are in decline and milk them dry, then toss out the corpse. I'd advise anyone who plays an MMO that gets sold to Gamigo to immediately stop spending money on it and continue playing f2p, if you enjoy the game at all. Idk about others, but a big part of my decision to spend on cash shops comes from whether I feel the game's monitization systems are ethical and whether it's a company I want to support, and present day Gamigo would always fail that test.
well.. running a server is cheap and that allows bs like that to happen...
They're a typical hedge fund. It's long past time to abolish capitalism. Capitalism is the source of literally all the world's problems.
@@Treklosopher Ah, if only I could be this naive again. The world seemed so simple to my ignorant eyes back then.
@@Treklosopher ah the classic display of ignorance: wishing on the death of capitalism from the comfort of their internet connected smart phone/ pc .
The very first game i spent money on, was League of Legends.
Back then we just didn't have any kind of good F2P PvP game that wasn't P2W. League came in, gave us a nice gameplay experience, constant updates and balance changes, even some free RP and skins thanks to events, and much more. I gladly started spending money on a monthly basis in their store since i already had hundreds of hours of good experience.
Another example was Black Desert Online.
I didn't quite like the in-game shop and subscription having already paid for the base game, but the game was nice and enjoyable nevertheless, so I only spent money there once.
I don't really get why people pre-purchase games or throw money away without testing the water first.
I haven't even considered buying Final Fantasy XIV until they expanded the F2P experience.
GameForge: Sweats profusely
They seem to be at least trying a little bit...? lol
@@Flo_JustFloo They just opened up a "fresh start" server for runes of magic.... Ontop of that there are exclusive end game titles with endgame STATs on them that only one person can get, this was fashioned so that whales spend a ton in the cash shop just to be the one to get that title in each catagory. All the while the game is broken, raids have so many bugs, enemies literally fall through maps etc. So nah gameforge aint really better.
@@Flo_JustFloo gameforge trying? damn. do you actually play anything of theirs? :/ gameforge are right up there at the top of Worst of the Worst, along with Gamigo and a few others. pure corporate garbage with zero interest in the games or players. their business model is very much alike Gamigos.
They killed the probably best PvP MMO and 2 more games I actually liked... Yeah gf is shit
@@venator... hmm ok my bad
This makes Nexon, NCSoft, Trion, and other companies look like decent companies despite their business models sadly. You might as well make a series of "MMOs that are dead or going to die because Gamigo now owns them" series.
Suddenly i feel less shit that NCSoft owns the western rights to BnS
@@V2ULTRAKill Played Rift from beta onwards. Rift stopped adding content long before Gamigo bought Trion.
Remember Trion’s last act is to sell it’s failing games to Gamigo.
@@cgirl111 oh im aware
I had to explain that to a rift fanboy earlier
But at least NCSoft puts effort in while milking shit
Even Wildstar was actually worked on until it died
Rip wildstar
I mean Gamingo is known as the MMO Graveyard. It is where games go to die.
I can only imagine the person that convinced marketing to contact you about making a video for them was actually a really pissed developer at gamigo, who wanted exactly what happened.
As a person who spent her entire teenage years with numerous MMORPGs I am heartbroken to see them in the hands of such selfish corporates which sucks their blood till the last drop. Many of those games could’ve been still serviceable even for today’s standard because not everything is graphics. Thanks for mentioning these! I am genuinely relieved to see many other people thinks so, thanks to your content and the comment section. Keep up the good work 🙏 Cheers!
Might I suggest City of Heroes.
It is they only game that is now truly in the hands of the fans and the players.
You just thanked a video and a comment section 😐
Go outside.
Get a friend.
@@ih7729 lol I didn't. read it again. "thanks to.." is used as "through" in that sentence.
Having to admit your illiteracy is indeed amusing. Nice try!
@@ih7729 Why are you here?
@@ih7729 Lol dummy
I have no worries. My favourite game cannot be bought by Gamigo. It's already owned by Tencent. Oh wait
DST?
League of legends?
PoE?
@@xXDESTINYMBXx League of Legends isn't in a bad situation though, its always gonna be updated, even if the game itself is actually trash.
@@JrKengu imo it is, they killed the itemisation for mages this season and there's a ton of unbalanced stuff.
When you mentioned Wizard101, I skipped a beat... If there's any game I cannot see falling, it's definitely games like Wizard101. I seriously would sign a petition against Gamigo's influence if it breaks such childhood games.
Bro same,
All the idiots thinking wWizard would get better and better because it was assimilated 🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@joroc It actually is though, it is finally being upgraded to 64bit and we are getting a bunch of quality of life changes and some new content
I’m hoping wiz survives. It’s not amazing but I have so much nostalgia for it. I’d hate to see it die
@@lazydeo3 Here's hoping it keeps on like this. Optimism's all we need!
It hurts me so much that Fiesta has been brutally murdered by Gamigo. Fiesta used to have this really nice starting town and a really active community. Then OutSpark died and Gamigo grabbed up the game and just destroyed it. They killed what I would have considered being a pretty great game at one point.
On the bright side fiesta private servers are more popular than the game itself
@@MercyMO2 I might have to look into that tbh. Gamigo didn't just put fiesta on life support, they actively went out of their way to fuck up literally everything.
@@deadturret4049 actually, ones releasing aug 20th if u want a link
I notice Aeria's games are here too. I used to be on both. I guess they both died and Gamigo took both and are killing their games further.
@@PinkAgaricus So i just looked that up, and apparently Aeria Games actually merged with Gamigo.
I remember it being kind of a meme to call them "Old Man Aeria Games" so I guess Gamigo finally put them in a retirement home.
While watching this I booted up a game I hadn't played in a while just to be greeted by the gamigo logo and I'm pretty sure we live in a simulation now
Which game was it? Do you remember?
Seconding, what game was it? My guess is Trove.
@@ThatDangBee probably. I'm thinking about making a game SIMILAR (NOT a copy/ripoff) to trove (without the crap) because it saddens me to see it die sine Gamigo bought it. My long term goal would be to open-source it in a way so that developers and artists in the community could improve the game
Damn it, I just got back into Wizard101 after watching Josh's "Worst MMO Ever?" video on it.
I love how Wizard101 was the only one or one of the few games he praised on the *Worst MMO Ever* series. Really shows how good the game is. I also returned last year, enjoy it my friend
I just left it/got back to it a year ago (really was back in 2020) dropped it, then picked it up again yesterday!
I wish more people knew of this channel. Its a real diamond in the rough
The Wizard101 subreddit actively *supporting* Gamigo's takeover of the game is one of the most insane things I've witnessed within the community.
...please tell me you're not serious.
i’m in that community and after watching this i’m very scared. many other haven’t realized the severity yet but they will soon
Said this in another comment, but I don’t think anyone there knew/knows about the history of this company. This video got posted there though and it’s spreading more awareness.
@@koifruit have they banned the person who posted it?
@@jeice13 lol no. mods in that sub don’t just ban people for having an opinion
Meanwhile at Gamigo:
- Did he swallow our bait?
- No, he seems to be going in full out war mode towards us now.
- Oh sheeeeeiiit...
I don‘t think they care at all tho honestly
More like:
-did he swallow our bait?
-no
-ah okay check for the other 2 million we asked
Anyway back to marking settlements...
At worst, it's "negative reinforcement" in driving the business lens of "any interest is good interest."
At best, er. Worst (for the CEO's, **Not** the Customer.) It's "I'm now gonna dodge any-and-all games with Gamigo on the title."
Archage was my favorite game when it first released, it was incredible i still havent found another game that does classes like it. I remember i stopped playing because they began locking off features behind a paywall that were previously simply apart of the game. Sad
I'm glad I saw this as well just after watching your Wizard101 review, as I was previously very hopeful for the future of the game. Now, however, I am completely crushed that Wizard101, a game I actually grew up with, is likely going to die now. I wish there was something I could have done to stop this, and I know many of my friends would say the same, along with many other players. I'll try to enjoy it while it lasts, and hope it lasts for a long time, however I don't see that happening anymore. Despite how sad this made me, thank you very much, Josh, for waking me up to the reality of the situation. I'll try to spread the word and share your video to my friends, content creators and some of the Kingsisle dev staff that I am in contact with. I doubt anything can or will be done, but at least the word about Gamigo can be spread.
"It's going to the executives so they can by another yacht."
And with that, you've earned my like and subscribe.
Fiesta was one of my first MMO's aside from Runescape before 2010 and seeing one of my childhood games get killed by too greedy companies is sad.
I still play Fiesta sometimes just for the nostalgia. I was never a casher even back in 2008 cuz my mom didn't let me buy stuff. But back then even non-cashers could lvl up fine. Now?? It's impossible. It's unbalanced and a lot of players are a bunch of mercenaries charging gold to help in dungeons like Crystal Castle, Dragon's Tomb ou Izyel. The game is dead sadly. Every single player I talk who is nice says that only plays for nostalgia
@@gbzebs most of the community has moved on to private servers. Pretty much everyone on those is well acquainted with the game and is playing for nostalgia. Much better experience imo with much less p2w
Miss playing fiesta out on 2013 days saturday specifically farming silver ores in cave of wind, worth more than have today some stuff in there and won't play cuz I'm busy in stuff or simply have no energy to play fiesta in a DEAD server.
Seeing my son going 0/6 as yasuo in league while I spend thousands of dollars for his education is also a good example of sunk cost
I feel you.
sent for him an apprenticeship could spark the proper light within him quicker than prolonging it with schoold for him
Ahahaha best comment!!!
Sounds like you don’t have a son anymore to me.
just wait for the 0/10 powerspike
Had "pleasure" being introduced to Gamigo via Trove, a nieche voxel sandbox MMO.
The game after the release used to have a massive playerbase with activity raching top spots on steam. However, after years of development Trion, the creators of the game, started to struggle financially, since they decided to push for more microtransactions instead of quality updates which led to a decrease in playerbase and very infrequent updates.
It all came down to Trion being sold to Gamigo. Did Gamigo try to fix the situation?
Absolutely not,
they stick to the same schedule of very infrequent updates and same monitesation
(monitesation in that game was very forgiving, there were only a few things you couldn't obtain via playing the game and trading).
Now the game proceeds to be in stagnation.
I left it years ago, all my clanmates, or at least most of them, including the guild master did too,
mind you we were literally the largest CIS clan (clubs they were called) and one of the top, at least 10 I believe if not 3, overall.
Nothing changed since then and that's so unfortunate, the game had so much potential you can't imagine.
9:00, funny how you have a Fiesta add on the left side while showing us the player base.
hey ma, it's me!! (points at the patreon list) (i'm pepperoni pizza haha)
i've been wondering this for a while, but would you ever consider doing a video about the process of an mmo dying? like what kind of factors lead to it, what the signs are like, etc., before they're acquired by a company like gamergo? i think that would be really fascinating. love your videos!
Ooh tracking the death of a game, interesting concept, yes.
Thank you for the patreon support :)
Imagine that seeing the population numbers and dev blog posts following updates should give a nice perception.
Ohhh nice idea
And then give that series name : "MMO Autopsy, The death of
It would be cool to see a collab with Nerdslayer from the Death of a Game series!
You mean like... Death of a Game by nerdSlayer Studios?
I just love how Gamigo always states, "The games could not sustain itself." NO SHIT! YOU NEED TO SPEND THE MONEY TO KEEP THE GAME FRESH AND FUN.
It's not a fuckin' living, breathing creature that can hunt for food and survive. If you leave a game to 'survive,' it slowly starves and eventually 'dies'. It needs the care of a development team to keep it going.
I think the best way way to look at it is domestic dogs VS. Wolves. Gamification thinks that their games are Wolves, who can hunt and sustain themselves, when they’re more like Domesticated Dogs who can live for a much longer time but only if you put the love, care, treatment, and money into them.
@@NameInWorkshop I think zoos are a better analogy. You see this animal in the wild hear how people love it, then decide to put it in an exhibit for people to pay to see it. Like a tiger. Then you start adding all these extra costs to see the tiger, raking in more money. But at no point do you invest in the tigers quality of life. It's stuck in a small cage, it's caretakers have no idea how to take care of it or how to properly feed it. And even if they did they don't have the budget. The tiger is stressed, grows ill, but the zoo won't pay a veterinarian to make it better. And eventually the tiger dies. The zoo claims the tiger just didn't have the ability to take care of itself, but in reality the tiger was doing just fine in the wild, thriving even, until you decided to exploit it to death, and sell off its pelt to collectors and its bones to people who think they hold medicinal properties.
Not taking a dig at zoos, just an analogy.
chess? checkmate.
I disagree with this. If a game is "mature" in it's content, you don't need monthly updates. The player base will provide the content for each other as long as you don't mess it up and just focus on moderating and bug fixes, with an occasional bone in a (preferably QA tested) update thrown here and there. Would World of Warcraft do great with another expansion? Probably. Can it do fine if it doesn't get an update in three years from Blizzard. It just might. Would EVE Online have been fine if Athanors were never introduced and moon goo was done by POSes still and the venture was never made a thing, forcing people to mine in destroyers until they got a barge? Probably. It didn't need the "noob ship" for the first 10 years, it could have gone fine without it for another 10.
A mature game will do great with lots investment, but it doesn't need a while lot more than survival mode staff as long as the bosses don't fuck up what was good. You can look in your steam library and probably fine some multiplayer games that could have used some updates, but also some great games that got their last update more than a decade ago. Besides the fact is, even if they wanted to copy Blizzard... they aren't Blizzard. Internally, they don't know how to do big budget stuff and I doubt their HR even knows how to separate the good from the okay talent.
Obviously pushing things on the cash shop, not doing things like bug fixing, and pushing untested updates will cause the game to crash and burn, but games don't need to grow to survive or even grow to stay good. As long as they keep things nice for the original player base, word of mouth can allow a constant moderately profitable stream of revenue that might not be the next World of Warcraft, but is sustainable. What's odd to me is that "survival mode, but don't fuck it up and kill the goose" doesn't involve much risk (since you rely mostly on the built in code) and probably earns back itself in 3 years over the aggressive cash shop route but the still do this.
And these devs taking care of the game and "sustaining" it have to be paid. Which means the game HAS to bring in some money and revenue...it always baffles me when I see gamers complain how companies do DLCs or MTX instead of just pouring money in the game and hope for the best. Josh says it: risk. Risk is not soemthing you just shrug away...
Not much into MMOs - but I am a total war fan. And so often I see "fans" complain about faction DLC, Lordpack-DLCs etc - "they should just release a complete game!" - yeah, sure...and sell the game that is in development then for ten years for 400 € to get the money back? Delusional ideas some gamers have about how money works...
Thanks for the heads up Josh, a major amount of my community play these games, we thought it was bad back in the old days with Trion, always wondering, now I know and so do they. Never change Josh, don't you ever change.
Atlas Reactor was a small game but a fun and unique game. It didn't get advertised nearly enough as most of the people found it by word of mouth. when gamigo bought trion the first thing I remember was the announcement that they would shut down the game. then about a year later they say Atlas would be returning as Atlas Rogues. At first I thought cool a rogue lite in the Atlas universe this is gonna be fun, and it came out and they basically removed everything that made Atlas unique and made it a bootleg X-Com game... and since of course that didn't make enough money in the first few months even tho it was a beta and again 0 advertising. They have now shut that down.
Gamigo is seriously the worst company I've ever seen.
I miss Atlas Reactor.. Back when Trion was there, and it wasn't p2w and also completely dead. ;-;
I remember when I started Fiesta , it still belonged to the previous company and it was quite good back then. When Gamigo took over, they didn't do nothing, they changed things, but to the worse. Now it's just solo grinding, because the mobs are so much easier to kill that you don't need partners until high level . The King Quests are no longer visited ( although you get good items out of it ) because you get a lot more XP from the quests + grinding now that you quickly grow out of level for the KQs.
Basically they took out all the social stuff off the game.
also be default whisper and trade requests etc are by default off? What is the point of that?
Your channel is such a gem, I hope someday you get the recognition you deserve, until then, please don’t stop doing theses videos, I know I’ll never stop watching them, you’re helping me through some confusing times, I really appreciate it man, and I don’t even play any MMO’s as of right now (I come and go with theses games). Thanks man, loved the vid
you remind me of totalbiscuit.. the way you analize and so on.. You have good points!
Thats high praise, thank you :)
A solid comparison.
I was just thinking this! I loved Total Biscuit!
@@JoshStrifeHayes quite the honour to be compared to totalbiscuit, may he rest in peace ♡
let's hope that it doesn't end the same way,
Wizard101 is my favorite mmo and the only one I play. I'm only at 4:00 rn and I'm honestly scared like whats goin on with all this
I quite literally just heard this from JSH and it hurts my soul.
I love Wizard101, it was my first ever MMO, and it was there for me when I was going through some of the worst years of my life. Seeing the game fall into the hands of these greedy, slimy money-grubbing corporate suits is just fucking tragic.
Literally just rejoined from the video and now I find this bruh
That *DON'T* at 2:05 actually worked twice LMAO!!
What is legitimately horrifying is the fact that nearly everything mentioned is already begging for wizard101
Trove was so good, so much potential.
Then boom gamingo and trion not caring for it anymore. I couldn't take one more second of waiting 20 years for a block to load due to the trash servers making the game almost unplayable because they removed shadow tower for some stupid delve thing.
Wait... Trove ? The cubic mmo where you can build your own "base" to craft and upgrade your shit with mounts and loads of self generated worlds ? That Trove ?
@@TehShinegami yea
@@B1u35ky So it is dead too... god dammit...
@@TehShinegami shockingly trove has gotten better under gamigo
I was instantly reminded of Total biscuit the first time I saw a video of yours a few weeks back.
Am now subscribed and love the videos.
Keep up the awesome work mate. :)
Can we have a moment of silence for our fallen MMOs?
Wish i could play these dead games
@@pressedv3017 Probably a private server somewhere.
@@professionalfangster1510 if there was a ps for rift I’d be really happy to play it
Pour one out for all those flash MMOS
@@pressedv3017 i wish i could play defiance again
The end of this video feels like the Michael Jordan meme: "Stop it. Get some help."
Stop killing games, Gamigo.
Another tradgedy of the genre: When an MMO gets shut down, that's it. When a single-player game stops being supported, it's still playable.
If companies were required to release the source code, both client and server, when they stop supporting a program, their former customers who actually liked it could do the support work themselves. Not to mention that when the likes of Gamigo kill a game, the fans could patch out all the crap that was introduced to kill the game.
Ah, a fellow Ross' Game Dungeon enjoyer I assume.
I think at the very least, if a company does not have any plans to copy, distribute, sell, or otherwise use an IP in a country or region at all for the foreseeable future, they should lose protections for that intellectual property. I think this makes sense, if they don't intend to monetize or otherwise make use of something, why not let others use it?
@@RegalRoyalWasTaken The name rings a bell, but I'm not sure if I've actually watched any of it. Probably just a case of two people having a similar philosophy.
@@Roxor128 He did a really good video about how games as a service is fraud. Its good shit.
@@lorscarbonferrite6964 US trade laws are weird.
If a company doesn't actively protect their IPs, eventually the courts view that as neglect and stop allowing them to keep their IPs.
I'm not saying they have to be Disney level shit where they're suing a kid who drew mickey, but if they're not actively protecting the IPs they start losing all of them.
There's literally a term for this in the studio. It's called sunsetting the game, just ride the wave, set up perpetual milking mechanisms and stop fixing bugs
13:05 this is my favourite bit. Every MMO out there will have their rabid fans who have invested so much into the game they are unwilling to let go, who will defend the game to it's death.
When you'd rather pay some youtuber to shill for you than pay for a product he'd advertise for free
kind of a late reply by this point but, have you heard of RAID: Shadow Legend! Quite literally the very embodiment of that business practice at its finest.
@@Luckeux The reason youtubers pump Raid: Shadow Legends so hard is they pay very well for advertising their games.
There's a lot of companies that are sketchy about paying content creators on social media, but Raid: Shadow Legends and that wallet making company always pay on time and well.
@@CrashB111 I mean, I know. I'm not criticizing any youtuber banking in on that either, I'm glad they can get extra dough anywhere really.
But still, that shit's prime meme material.
@@Luckeux yeah thats another thing about gamigo, even if josh accepted it, they wouldnt have paid or paid very little lol, raid on the other hand actually pays, thats why i never angry at youtubers who shill for raid, they have ulube to fight for demonitization already.
and yeah i once even installed raid on a sponsored link...deinstalled after 30 min, it was so generic...
@@CrashB111 Any time you see tons and tons and tons of youtubers advertising a product, it makes sense to assume the company is spending its money on ads instead of on developing the product itself. All unpaid coverage of those companies (Raid, Raycon earbuds, NordVPN) that I've seen has described them as inferior to similar products. As long as viewers know to take the ads with a grain of salt then everything is fine, but that would defeat the purpose of advertising in the first place.
This is a painfully fantastic videos that hurts to hear but is good to take in. Gamigo has bought a few games I love not long ago and it's incredible to see and hear after watching them all change with the new launches like archeage. Great video.
I died inside, when you hovered over Atlas Rogues... for fuck sake, Atlas reactor was such a great game...sadly developed by trion... then trions games got sucked up into gamigo and all updates stopped, until it eventually was taken offline...
It was unique.. it was awesome, only held back by the companies, that owned it... and the time in which it came out
Basically if a Game is selling themselves to Gamigo then they are already on the downhill Spiral
They have not fallen for the sunken cost fallacy. Why spend money on an old mmo when you can sell it and work on a new one.
speaking of spirals, Spiral Knights, developed by three rings and Sega. No real updates after 2016 apart from re-occouring seasonal events, but pumping out tons of lootboxes with new accessories to attach to your armor, which reach unrealistically high prices in the ingame market.
The game started fair, the paid currency in the game is called "Energy" I think. You use it to play stages or craft. It regenerates, to a maximum of 100. You need 200, then 400, then 1000 I think to craft better gear, and "crystal energy" can be bought on top of the regular energy to be able to craft those. The premium currency, Crystal Energy can be bought with ingame money as well, from other players, which is almost too good to be true!
You could also revive other players by giving them half of your hearts, but the reviving is now changed to require energy.
Then they introduced lootboxes that are bought with real money only.
The game is good but on a steady decline with no updates.
Now that I think, I knew the game was dying back in 2015.
The cash shop focus is first sign of the inevitable end, selling the ownership is the nail in the coffin. Then it's just a steady decline with no updates.
And then there's roblox where you can't trade at all unless u have bought robux with irl money in the past 30 days. What a ripoff.
that's kinda it is it :p
a MMO that is doing well will know their worth and wont be looking to sell.
but one that is experiencing decline will be pushed by companies like to "cut their losses" andsell ot them...even if the slump is workable by doing htis the game is doomed anyway.
These guys better not ruin my baby Wizard101 😭 I swear if they take away my only nostalgia game that still exists...
Why do gamigo kill mmorpgs? Umm... money! Every single mmorpg they own is literally a cash cow to them. Also they dont kill as muc as they Refurbish and make it look like its brand new. Rip archeage
Except they make nothing look brand new, they just tell you everythings gonna be alright then they just stick it all the way in with no lube
So they are the "EA of MMORPGs" then.
@@the11382 They actually kill fewer MMO’s than EA. The lifespan of an EA online game can sometimes be measured in weeks.
Gamigo didn't kill ArcheAge or any of these other games. They bought them because they were already on a track towards dying, and they just let them do that. Same as Gameforge and a number of other garbage " "publishers".
@@Ithirahad You literally just said it yourself.. The games were DYING and Gamigo grabbed them and did the final blows, in other words, they KILLED them. lol
My favourite part of any of these videos is the bit that says "say you have a..." or "it's a bit like when you...".
Mr. Hayes, your analogies are wonderful, sir.
This is an incredibly well formulated video and I genuinely feel more informed because of it. You can tell Josh has experience as a teacher.
nooo they touched Twin Saga, Eden Eternal, and Wizard101!? I didn't know anything about Gamigo until this channel but they've touched my childhood! Now its personal 😭
Seriously they’re eating my memories lol
That came out seriously wrong.
Well, don't think they expected this video when they sent that sponsor e-mail... hahahaha
Thanks for another great video! I've always lived by the motto "to make money, you have to spend money". If Gamigo doesn't like risk, they shouldn't run a company. I think what Gamigo and companies like it don't get is that all of the most successful games have one thing in common: they did something new, they took a risk.
Well they *are* still spending money (buying games and/or devs) to make money. I'm just saying.
Insightful stuff. It answers a lot of questions that have frustrated me over the years.
I’m glad you made this video and I hope a lot of people see it. One recommendation for your Worst MMO series, if you haven’t considered it already, Champions Online.
Gamigo is in the lemon squeeze business for so long, they know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it
I was hopeful for Defiance. I was a day-one player, and watched the show with nerdy interest because the universe created truly excited me. It was sad for me when I started to realize that it wasn't going anywhere good for the game or the TV show.
Oh well. You live and you learn.
"A thing isn't beautiful because it lasts."
-The Vision
I honestly thought Defiance was amazing when it first came out, and initially it did well but they clearly focused too much on the first 1/3rd of the game and not at all towards the later stages when almost everyone left.
Rift may shutdown but i pray Wizard101 does not it was my childhood
This is the problem with software as a service in general. You're always going to be at the total mercy of some suit somewhere.
I had no idea they bought Wiz until this video and now I'm a bit terrified for it. I've played it for years and actually got back into it recently trying to max out all my wizards. It will be beyond disappointing to have all that progress, money, time, and pure childhood wonder and enjoyment just get flushed down the drain
@@CarleyAndHannahShow that one of my worries on returning to wiz tbh i most interested in wow cause wiz recent changes destroy my school(storm)
@@Trini_kessar They've been changing a lot of things lately lmao some of it is kinda nuts, like turning Orthorus into an aoe
@@CarleyAndHannahShow let see how much longer the community will take before players start to leave
I just found your channel recently but it is obvious that you have strong principles, Josh. I love that. This video reawakened an anger against Gamigo that I forgot for so many years.
I remember Outspark Fiesta. It was a lovely place for me as a kid, an imaginative world full of adventure with a wonderful community. I did not even understand what was going on at the time, but Gamigo destroyed Fiesta. Over the years I gave up on finding anything like Outspark Fiesta again. I became a lonely, cynical adult. Now I am beginning to wonder if maybe I can find something like what I had back then.
Back when I first watched this I became really concerned for Wizard101’s future. Sure the game has a ton of issues, but it’s still something I love dearly. But recently KingIsle announced that they looking to hire 70 new employees and are going to be updating Pirate101 again, so maybe things are taking a turn for the better? But then again, the last world they released reused a shit ton of assets so who knows how things are actually gonna turn out.
Firstly I'm just surprised Gamingo could muster 28 employees to unlike this video.
What's the shittiest part of what Gamingo does to these games is lying to the players. Constantly. To keep us spending. Not only does the game end but could do without that kick in the balls to go with it. Last month one of their unpaid "Community Ambassadors" was telling us to "expect new content this year" on their official Discord channel. Don't you need to get paid to be a sellout? I don't even know what that'd be called. Then the whale fluffer threatened to ban me for contradicting him. But yeah, for the last year on Defiance we were told we'd be getting fixes and new content and basically "keep spending money" while they work on the game. Now we have 0 fixes and shutdown in a few weeks. They flat out lied hundreds of times to us over the last 3 years. Unforgivable greedy bastards. This vid is great and I hope anyone playing a Gamigo game somehow finds it. I can't share it on their Discord, or forum since I've been banned from both over the last 2 weeks. It needs to get put in zone chat of every one of their games. Thanks CB for sharing it on the forum, since i can't say it there.
This has aged so hilariously. IN that now youtube HIDES all negative reviews. oh youtube.
Corporations must be happy now that google made up a excuse to hide peer to peer opinion, f*** hidden dislikes
Great vid Josh, totally agree with how Gamigo destroy every game they took over, its common knowledge at this point. That aside, which game publisher/developer out there you think is good? Basically opposite of Gamigo
pearl abyss!
Riot Games, Pearl Abyss, Grinding Gear Games, ...
Can I just say it's absolutely phenomenal seeing the growth of this channel in a year? From 40k subscribers in Jan 2021 to 354k subs in Dec 2021, JSH, you rock mate!
Hey Josh, I've just found your channel and have been loving your content. I would like to point out my disagreement with your statement at 4:39. You said that (rephrased through my understanding, forgive me if I'm wrong) if one focus on long term profit, then A and B should be relatively close.
Through my experience in running family business (my family runs a restaurant so do not take my opinion highly), the ideal scenario would be to raise C (B-A=C, basically the difference between A and B) over a period of time. It is obvious that C
I am still salty about Rift and the decision to paywall one equipment slot, a slot that takes VERY VERY potent gear in them. One would think magical armors are better than earrings, but nope.
So now I'll never see the end of Pirate101.
Wdym
@@firedolphin7621 Pirate101 is the red-headed step-child of Wizard101; so if W101 is already getting milked for all its worth before it gets discarded, P101 is probably not even gonna get that much.
@@Clorgisclorg yeah I agree
May the YT algorithm be in your favor Josh Strife Hayes, thanks so much for the content!
This video makes me immensely scared for what gamigo will do to wizard101. That game was my childhood game and if it shuts down I'll be insanely sad.
Same here, the acquisition is sounding like a death sentence.
Me too! And the game does have newer players who seem to enjoy it. I'd hate to see them not be able to play anymore because of Gamigo.
The news that the creator of KI and a bunch of devs were fired did not scared you 🤣🤣
@@joroc Even KI's founder was fired? RIP Wizard101 indeed
@@richardwicker8456 he left by personal choice in 2012 I think. He probably knew the game was gonna be ruined by the CEO eventually, and didn't wanna be there to see it happening
I really love how you're making your videos! Your scripts are on point!
Well, that last image in the video kinda hurt me, though. Big Eden Eternal player here. Well, never paid anything in there, but that's my "childhood game" as you worded it. It's terrifying how I didn't even react when I got the mail saying the game will be shut down. Dunno which part of me accepted it... I still remember seeing people claiming Gamigo cared about the players because we had some goodies to bring into Aura Kingdom or Grand Fantasia... Games left to die, yeah, pretty much! I'm rarely listening to the news, but I had this feeling Gamigo was not a good omen for some reason! Who knows if Aeria was better! I just feel sad learning how my favourite game ever probably died. Thanks for all these explanations! =)
- I'm playing on Eden Eternal Vendetta (private server), so I've always wondered if your ever thought about making a video about this game: to me, it's pretty difficult finding any real faults in it, and I really love how you look at games! Definitely a review I'd like to see before the game eventually dies for good ! -
Seeing that Fiesta footage REALLY gets my nostalgia going. Played this pretty hard for a while back when this came out about 2006 or something. But after a while Gamigo took over completely and in record time the game literally became unplayable without spending money. A Friend of mine who was in the top guild at the time and one of the top players spend upwards of 3.000 a year just to be able to actually PLAY the endgame content. If anyone is interested there are quite a few stories about HOW ridiculous this could become i could tell.
Just wanted to say I really enjoy your content
Thanks :)
R.I.P. Defiance I loved the game even though Trion Worlds never treated it right before selling it out to Gamigo.
Defiance is a ironic name in this case
Have not heard of them and after watching your video Mr Hayes, I am glad and thankful the games wife and i love in the mmo space was never owned by this crappy shady company.
Loved the video. You should cover Aura Kingdom - definitely the best game cursed to have been purchased by Gamigo. It still has a great passionate community and is extremely active for an anime MMORPG from 2014.
One additional thing worth explicitly mentioning about the sunk cost fallacy: Spend time can count as part of the "sunk cost", and many free-to-play companies exploit that.
I feel like the real purpose of Gamigo is to do what Trion/NCSoft/etc. want to do with their declining properties while insulating those companies from the reputation hit of milking a formerly successful game and then shuttering it.
Thing is, as much as it pains me to say it, most MMOs never reach the level of popularity that makes continued investment worth it. If a game does not break into the top 3 MMO tier for a sustained period of time, it will eventually require so much investment to stay current that basically any level of investment isn't worth it economically. Ultima Online, EveryQuest 1, and DaoC are still online because they broke that threshold, but games like W:AR (may it rest in peace) are not online because they failed to reach the upper echelon.
If you look at Rift, it's basically going down the same path that W:AR did. It's a game that's good but not great and it never managed to capture a massive audience. Even at the point the game was sold to Gamigo, it would have required a full-game refresh to get it that audience. I'm sure hardcore Rift fans may have wanted that, but from Trion's perspective, doing so would have been Sunk-Cost Fallacy at a massive scale. But shutting the game down would have caused a major hit to Trion's reputation and undercut their pitch for future MMO's, which require players to believe that the game will not be shut down for a long time / ever. So instead, they sold the game to Gamigo and let them bleed it dry.
That's not to say that what Gamigo is doing is right, though. Even if I understand their business model, I still think it would have been more ethical to just these games down and release the code to allow for fan servers rather than exploiting people's nostalgia with minimum investment. At this point, I think the best policy is to treat games purchased by Gamigo as functionally dead. Doing so can spare you the frustration of watching a game you love slowly being strangled.
"I feel like the real purpose of Gamigo is to do what Trion/NCSoft/etc. want to do with their declining properties while insulating those companies from the reputation hit of milking a formerly successful game and then shuttering it." Then what is Gameforge doing then?
I wonder if someone can buy the IP from the gamigo leeches and remake the games.
These companies are just like the devil. You make a contract and get the benefits, but you lose your soul in the process and your ultimate fate its the depths of hell.
I learned my lesson with City of Heroes. I bought the game and both expansions, none of which are playable offline, not even the character creator. On top of that, I paid my monthly subscription fee for that entire period. And because I wanted to encourage them to continue creating content for the game, bought nearly every microtransaction they offered, all the seasonal costumes, the server storage for my own scenarios, my own base, everything. More hundreds of dollars than I can even remember.
Then they got bought by NCSoft who decided to shut the game down, not because it wasn't profitable, but because it wasn't profitable _enough._ They figured they could use those same resources for Lineage 2 and make more money that way. They continued to sell microtransactions right up to the second they announced the closure, and simply stole everyone's money. Everything I'd invested in the game, gone. The company didn't care in the slightest about the people who had invested a decade and hundreds or thousands of dollars into the game. They knew no one was going to sue them in Korea, so they just screwed everyone over and moved on.
Since City of Heroes closed, I have not spent a single penny on an MMO. Not one shiny dime. And I never will. They taught me that any money I spend on a game which relies on the goodwill of a soulless corporation is money I might as well use for toilet paper.
In case you didn't know, there are enough fans of CoH out there that you can still play it, even with some updates! Look for Homecoming and enjoy a fun time =)
that game was awesome!
Full source code for CoH's server files is available on the net ~25GB. And if you ever feel like exploring memory lane, you can play one of the private servers that were made with the leaked code.
you had 44.6k subs on the fiesta online video, it's good to see your channel growing
Excellent video. I'm still playing rift (because of dimensions) but completely agree with everything you say. What drove me nuts were people I play with saying gamigo should invest into Rift to make more money. Complete lack of understanding of business costs and risk.
I love this guy, declines a money offer to maintain the integrity of even a small channel. Cheers king.
He's thinking long-term, something Gamigo would be wise to mimic.
Nothing will ever break my heart in gaming as much as Rift going to Gamigo. I miss Telara.
Rift we will miss you body we will miss you
R.I.P Rift
Guys put some F for Rift
F
F
I can believe this. Used to play fiesta, one day I heard out out of the blue fiesta was being acquired effective immediately and the previous publisher outspark was being very shady as every game shut down with fiesta being sold. And in the other games there were in game cash shop sales before service termination and outspark disappearing.
I respect your analysis and this entire video. Sound analysis and just listening to you was incredible.
Funny how fast they deleted this YT link when I shared it on official discord server of Fiesta NA. LOL
I got it before they removed.
Thanks king.
Last Chaos was so fun in the early version 😂 back then 10+ years ago
When i was kid, having dragon mount that could attack was cool af
Yeah i remember playing it in like 08 early 09
last chaos I had forgotten that one XD
Yep!! Last chaos here in Brasil was called last war. And was a great game w/o too much flashing animations and such comon to eastern mmo and i liked that. Also the elementalist class was cool af
Dude you just gave me a big nostalgia trip, it was pretty much the only mmo that i actually returned to after dropping it once. It had so many interesting aspects but in the end most of them were so, so poorly executed ( The split of character progression between levels and SP sounds interesting, in practice due to the piss-poor balance of SP gains people were grinding for couple months in the same dungeon with the guild exp lock). One class i think i was most interested in was the summoner elementalist, which was painful because i believe it still disconnects you from the server regularly if you use an ability at the wrong time
Rift will always be one my fav games. Was such a great concept imo. Wasn't perfect though. Not by a long shot. But still a fun experience
Woaah in 8 months you grew 200k? Mate congrats!
And to think you kept this level of quality from the start
A fantastic video. Keep up the good work.
The saddest part of all of this is the original makers sell off the game and know this will happen. The board members and CEO are often times the killer of passionate games
I mourned Rift a long time ago, its sad their corpse is still being flogged for more coins
Ah, this explains the Wizard 101 focus on pets, the deckathalon, and spellements.
Now this. This is sticking it to the man. Johns voice is his voice, not a companies. Mad respect
I feel like Gamigo is kinda like buying a hundred Tamagotchi, doing absolutely nothing, letting them die, and saying “they couldn’t sustain themselves”.