Is this game still viable?

[DrKJonz]

I am a returning player. I haven't played in a few years. I was on RIFT and reading their forums and the consensus there was that the game was on it's last legs. They felt that the company was just keeping it up until it no longer made money for them. My question here, before I dump money into it, is this: does this game have a future?

[wooglemoogle]

Yes. I can't say for Gamigo and RIFT (since iirc, RIFT dev team pretty much disbanded after Trion went bankrupt). But ArcheAge and the dev team at XL Games are in a better state right now than they were years ago.

The ArcheAge team has grown. KR has gotten more new content come out in the past year than ArcheAge got 3+ years after launch.

The company's state has improved. The structure was reorganized so that the CEO can focus more on leading game development and less on operations.

In the past, they had to shut down every future game project because of their massive failure with Civilization Online. Their mobile games all failed, including ArcheAge Begins.

Now, they've had decent success with Moonlight Sculptor for mobile. Kakao went from an investor to buying majority shares in XL since Pearl Abyss left the nest. They have multiple projects started up again, including their Unreal 4 MMORPG, a gacha anime mobile game, etc.

Whatever people say about the wasted potential ArcheAge had, ArcheAge pulled off what games like BLESS and Maplestory 2 couldn't. It fell to the point of certain death, went through large-scale changes, and somehow managed to come out in a better position than before as opposed to shutting down and disappearing forever.

[Zornar]

For the third quarter 2019, Gamigo reported that Rift accounted for 4%, Trove 15% and Archeage 11% of revenues. That made Archeage second in terms of revenue. Archeage seems very secure if it continues to produce that much of the total revenue especially considering Gamigo has over 30 MMOs and over 500 casual games.

Their 2019 annual report recently came out so there may he some more online articles pulling out key info. Gamigo had a video summary of their 3rd quarter report so maybe they will have another one of those.

Gamigo revenue was up 30% for the year. Gamigo thinks the coronavirus pandemic may actually increase their revenues as people stay home and turn to video games for entertainment. They did express concern that some governments were considering regulating loot boxes as a form of gambling.