Steam Quietly Withdraws Under Fire MMO Ashes of Creation From Sale As Fans Wonder Who's Left to Maintain the Servers
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Fucking sons of a bitches, a pox on private equity firms, I hope they all get leprosy.
I mean, yeah.
However, in this particular case I think the CEO was running this as a pump and dump for nearly a decade, claiming to be fully funded and having no board (because he claimed it was self funded), and giving himself massive raises year over year.
So a private equity firm bought something hollow. I have some guesses about it. Probably a friend of his, probably got it cheap, and is about to gut whatever is left now that the guy who did own it got out with what he could. Why would PE buy it otherwise? There's no goodwill or name to cash in on like what's being done with Native Instruments.
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Fun fact! Syphilis was known as the Great Pox, in contrast to Small Pox, which is why smallpox is called that!
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That title is horrible to read.
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Don't worry! Ashes of Creation is self-funded so it won't have any of the issues that other new MMOs have.
/s
It also technically '"released" to make sure nobody gets their promised refunds.
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I always had a bad feeling about this game, it sucks that it actually panned out.
In 2019, I had a bunch of people try sell me on the game when they did the original node auctions. It was doomed from back then. I never thought the game would release.
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It's a shame people get paid to write headlines like that.
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Fun fact! Syphilis was known as the Great Pox, in contrast to Small Pox, which is why smallpox is called that!
Now I know!
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I always had a bad feeling about this game, it sucks that it actually panned out.
I was hoping it would become what they were trying to sell, but I had every expectation of it becoming everything that is wrong about MMOs. The biggest sign was demanding $100 for people to be alpha testers. You should be paying people that instead.
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Fun fact! Syphilis was known as the Great Pox, in contrast to Small Pox, which is why smallpox is called that!
A pox on them, both great and small.
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It would seem that the owner sold it to a private equity group, which is predictably seeking to milk the game for profits.
Not very effectively. Canceling the product isn't usually great for profits.
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I was hoping it would become what they were trying to sell, but I had every expectation of it becoming everything that is wrong about MMOs. The biggest sign was demanding $100 for people to be alpha testers. You should be paying people that instead.
Economic realities exist. You cannot plausible fund a product that is this out there without some community support. And if you don't plan on selling mtx but be mostly free you gotta make a lot of money. Servers are expensive, yo.
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Not very effectively. Canceling the product isn't usually great for profits.
We might have to wait until their announcement on the 13th to know more, but if the launching of new merch and discussions of overseas development is anything to go by, they might not be canceling it, but rather replacing the entire development team with a new one overseas, all the while implementing microtransactions everywhere.
They'll have lost most of the public's goodwill in the process for doing so though.
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I mean, yeah.
However, in this particular case I think the CEO was running this as a pump and dump for nearly a decade, claiming to be fully funded and having no board (because he claimed it was self funded), and giving himself massive raises year over year.
So a private equity firm bought something hollow. I have some guesses about it. Probably a friend of his, probably got it cheap, and is about to gut whatever is left now that the guy who did own it got out with what he could. Why would PE buy it otherwise? There's no goodwill or name to cash in on like what's being done with Native Instruments.
Agreed. I've seen PE take overs of other software firms, and a big part of those take overs is the human capital / access to a team of skilled professional developers. PE typically doesn't just 'fire' everyone en masse, but rather chops the shop up and resells parts of the org as it scavenges the remains.
So this smells like something more fraudulent, and connected to SS -- especially as there have been notes that the intrepid 'board', on paper in filings, was just SS, the CEO. The messaging that came out from their comms director (I think that's what she was?) yesterday seems to generally support this, in that the Senior Management team was completely in the dark about anything that was going on -- they had practically the same notification of events, as everyone else. A board wouldn't normally do that, as the senior management team would each have a relationship/reporting obligations tied to board meetings (eg. c-level HR managers working out HR policies/budgets, Accountants providing audited monthly financials to the board, etc). I mean, a company that size would likely have an accountant, who would report out the financial state of the org at senior manager meetings -- so they'd all see the layoffs coming way in advance, not suddenly get a WARN notice that they aren't getting paid for the last pay period. The CEO is 'always' at board meetings as managements rep, but other SMs show up / attend based on agenda items/topics. Long and short, a shift like this wouldn't come out of nowhere at that level.
All that said, the comms director also noted that initially they'd thought it was just going to be 100 developers let go, but a day or two later found out it was everyone -- and it sounds like these were all 'local' developers, given that she was setting up an in person job fair to try and help x-staff find work. AoC having over 100+ developers at ~100k salaries is an absurd carrying cost that would likely be impossible to make work longer term financially. The sub costs for the player count just wouldn't support that spend, let alone licensing/server costs where they were already in the red pre-steam release (they had about $800k in hosting debts they were gettin sued for, from what I recall). So I really don't know what Intrepids business case generally looked like, but based on information available it seems pretty clear that their business model was unrealistic, hence pumpy dumpy.
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That title is horrible to read.
ive hated the use of "quiet" in clickbait articles headlines for a while now. i assume anything writing it is AI slop at this point. its just too common to ignore.
"this company just quietly did this thing"
" you wont believe what this CEO has been quietly investing in since COVID"
"this politician just said the quiet part out loud!"
"these are the top ten projects that countries have been quietly building for 20 years, you wont believe #9!"
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Fun fact! Syphilis was known as the Great Pox, in contrast to Small Pox, which is why smallpox is called that!
Lover's pox
