Rift & ArcheAge Developer Trion Worlds Sold, Suffers Huge Layoffs

After spending twelve years as an independent game developer, Trion Worlds has been acquired by Gamigo, a company which seemingly focuses only on free-to-play games. The free-to-play aspect of this acquisition makes sense, since F2P has been Trion’s modus operandi for the past five years or so.

This acquisition hits me as bittersweet, because while I never wanted to see the developer shutter, or find its way into another company’s arms, the fact that it’s happened isn’t surprising. In recent years, my opinion of Trion has plummeted, as the company shifted from making really quality titles to games skewed towards pay-to-win. That’s what happened to Rift, among others. Perhaps the entire catalog.

With games like Defiance, the game suffered a lack of fresh content. Defiance 2050 looks like a spitting image of Defiance to anyone who put a lot of time into the original. That kind of thing isn’t what I would have expected from Trion in its earlier days.

I never played any of Trion’s other titles, so I can’t comment on those, but sentiments found online seem to mirror the same sentiments I have for the games I have played. I fell in love with Rift and Defiance, so I hated to see the company in effect iterate on each game’s death (to me) more with each new update. Games went from being fun and pure to become a constant temptation to haul out my wallet. And the games suffered as a result, as did my love for them, since I stopped playing.

None of the games in question here are actually going to be killed off (right now), as Gamigo plans to continue running them for the foreseeable future. What that means for new content, we’re not quite sure. We do know that many have been laid-off from this move, with a skeleton crew of about 25 remaining to manage all of Trion’s titles. We are going to have to wait and see how things play out. We hope those employees left stranded will not remain so for long.

Ultimately, I consider this move to be very unfortunate, because I originally had so much faith in Trion, I truly expected it to become one of the most well-respected developers out there, on par with the likes of CD Projekt RED. I didn’t realize just how wrong I’d be. NCsoft is on the same path, so I would not be surprised to see it also make some major moves over the next couple of years, as its games became shining examples of pay-to-win years ago. With Trion and Turbine (Asheron’s Call, Lord of the Rings) effectively gone or limping, NCsoft being put out to pasture would rule the end of every single company that made me love MMOs to begin with.