Atari is selling off Cryptic

[Steve]

I rarely post here, but since I play CO, played STO, and have an interest in the future of those games, I figured I'd post on this given a lack of threads on the issue.

Atari is divesting itself of Cryptic.

Curious to see the various thoughts and opinions and vitriolic bile from the G&C crowd.

[Mr Bean]

Unless Cryptic is picked back up by NCSoft I'd say both MMO's are doomed. They make money but not hand over fist money which as is the tradition of companies everywhere is just not as popular. Running Star Trek Online and after server costs and paying staff for upkeep and releasing the occasional update if your only making a few million off of subscriptions they'd rather axe the game and move the staff elsewhere in hopes of gambling on another WoW Killer.

Of which every WoW killer has failed because, A. WoW never had 99% of the Market locked up to begin with, B. People get bored of MMO's and leave them for months/years at a time only to come back later. C. It's fucking Blizzard and your not.

So unless NCSoft picks them up in their sweap of what seems like 1000 Korean MMO's plus Guild Wars and City of Heros I predict doom for them.

[Feil]

So what happens with the new Neverwinter game Atari was hiring Cryptic to make? I was looking forward to that

[Rahvin]

I rarely post here, but since I play CO, played STO, and have an interest in the future of those games, I figured I'd post on this given a lack of threads on the issue.

Atari is divesting itself of Cryptic.

Curious to see the various thoughts and opinions and vitriolic bile from the G&C crowd.

Cryptic has a history of rough launches for promising titles. CO had an abysmal launch experience - client performance was poor, balance was awful. The game improved drastically with the Free2Play update (enough so that I actually reactivated my account) and they've continued to do well implementing things like "adventure packs" (story-based instanced quest lines, for-pay for the Free2Play folks, free to subscribers) and additional costume components and Archetypes. Balance is FAR better than at launch. The main highlights of the game, character customization and NOT being a WoW clone, are definitely going strong. The new content IS fun.

I know (just from watching the population of people online) that more people seem to be playing now than they were previously, and that's good. I also know that the Free2Play model works very well, often generating more money than a subscription with all of the smaller fees that add up.

But new content updates are slow and small, leading to boredom. My account has been reactivated for around 90 days, and I'm about ready to cancel again just because I don't really play often. The whopping three "adventure packs" (the third was just released) are only an hour or so worth of content each, and the other new "content" is just power sets ("Do the same thing over with different shiny lights, yay!") and costume pieces. The Free2Play subscribers don;t even get much character customization - the costume choices are extremely limited, you don;t get to choose your powers (you go with pre-defined "Archetypes" with set power progression and locked-in roles), you don;t even get to change the color of your powers (want your Fire Archetype toon to have green fire? Pay up for a subscription...). In a game whose primary draw is total customization of your character, that's pretty piss-poor even for free. I've found myself drifting back to WoW (for raiding, which I still find fun) and the well-done WoW clone RIFT (which is pretty, and pretty fun, and much better-designed than most other MMOs at launch). CO basically satisfied my altaholic nature by letting be create a bunch of new characters, mess around with them to level 20 or so, and then get bored of each one in turn. I think Cryptic can best be described as "too little, too late."

As the article says:

The studio, which recently took Champions Online free-to-play, showed a €5.3 million ($7.5 million) loss for the 2010/11 fiscal year, up from a loss of €12.6 million ($17.9 million) the previous year.

They aren't making money, pure and simple. I'm not surprised Atari wants to cut them loose - I had already decided to pass on any titles from Cryptic in the future unless they get outstanding reviews after the disappointment of CO, and I imagine many others feel the same.

[Edward Yee]

I wonder what this means for those who got lifetime subscriptions (Captain's Club) for STO.

[Chardok]

Well - this is unsurprising; with Atari going into primarily DL games, they'll want to be as lean as possible moving forward and having this money-sink tied around their neck isn't exactly conducive (SP?) to that strategy. How the mighty have fallen...Here's to hoping that Atari sits on DL game money for a few years, builds back up, then comes back hard in the next gen with....I dunno, an awesome iteration on the Battlezone (1998) game for...Project cafe, maybe? Hmmmmmmm......

[PREDATOR490]

I wonder what this means for those who got lifetime subscriptions (Captain's Club) for STO.

Anyone who got a lifetime subscription around Feb 2010 will have little reason to complain assuming they have played consistently for a full year. The LTS paid for around 18 months upfront. If Cryptic hang around long enough the LTS will start paying off for the early adopters. New LTS are far more likely to get shafted.

I myself bought a LTS during STO Beta and stopped playing a few months back but I'm not going to bother kicking up a fuss. The game is woefully lacking and I expect Cryptic will honour the LTS until they shut the servers. So in theory anyone who bought LTS can still play if they choose. Even though it seems increasingly pointless to do so now.
IF Cryptic dont honour the LTS... well folks got fucked but I at least got a decent run out of it on the promise of the game being what it CLAIMED to be. Folks buying LTS now or after Cryptic's repeated bullshit have less justification for hurling that kind of money down the drain.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

So what happens with the new Neverwinter game Atari was hiring Cryptic to make? I was looking forward to that

Seriously. And STO and CO just got "Atari-ized" not too long ago, too -- i.e., you pay "Atari points" for things instead of "Cryptic points". Then Atari just drops all three? Seems like a rather bizarre move. Yes, the company was losing money, but it had just shown gains -- 17 million in the red to only 7 million -- and a lot of that was undoubtedly tied up in the development of Neverwinter. So Atari just flushed all that development investment down the toilet? What?