PGI Divorces IGP

4

No, I’m not going dyslexic.

 

Over on the MWO site, there was quite the large announcement this afternoon…  PGI has “obtained” all publishing rights to MechWarrior Online (marketing, hosting, etc..) from IGP.  So, in essence, PGI is now self-publishing MWO!

This is a good thing, since you always hear rumors about how it’s publisher X’s fault that game Y launched early, or that Feature X was cut.  Sink or swim, it’s all in house now!

Here’s the full release:

Greetings MechWarriors,

It’s with great excitement that I share with you that Piranha Games Inc. has reached a deal with Infinite Game Publishing for the return of all MWO publishing rights to PGI as of September 1st 2014. Over the past three years Piranha enjoyed a good working relationship with IGP. From the beginning IGP brought passion and dedication to the MechWarrior brand and had many employees that were completely dedicated to the products success. However it can still be very difficult at times to make the corporate needs and strategies of two companies align, for this reason we were able to come to agreement with IGP for all publishing, marketing and hosting responsibilities to move to Piranha. With these responsibilities now here, everything from design, development, marketing and control of hosting resides within Piranha’s offices. It is our expectation that this will lead to much more efficient development and marketing of the product. Although we just signed the deal at the end of Aug, we have been operating under this model since the beginning of August, this is reflected in the increased community efforts and updates over the last five weeks. This, along with the marketing efforts of the many events and faction based sales. This is a good example of how efficiently things can be with all facets within the same office space, were committed to continuing this efficiency throughout the entire project.

 

For MWO, as I mentioned, I think this is a very good thing.  We’ve already seen increased communication from the PGI team since the beginning of August, they’ve been doing a good job meeting targets this year so far, and look to be continuing that trend without issue.  On the financial side, this means PGI only needs to pay Microsoft their license fee, and not also pay a publisher on top of it.  Being a smaller title, every bit of extra revenue they can pump back into the company, the better.  I’d expect some interesting questions about this development at tonight’s MWO town hall.

 

Honestly, I am however, very concerned about what this might mean for MechWarrior Tactics, since this now leaves MWT as IGP’s only title…and it appears to be abandoned…but… that’s a separate topic!

 

 

Now…. about this new game PGI…

A Universe to Explore  gimmie details! and, don’t make me wait till tomorrow.. the iPhone 6 announcement could run over!

4 Comments


  1. Unfortunately MWO is delayed with features, some for years now. Also lots of bugs and more often than not the CM annoys their playerbase. i hear they’re banning people for say bad things outside their forums now O.o

    I don’t see the publishers being to blame for this. I think there’s an article about a forum ragesplosion about design decisions making players quit in droves.

    Also their metacritic score is bad. seems silly the publisher is getting all the blame.

    I wouldn’t go near that game. Too many horror storys.


    1. Blizzard is delayed with features, some for years (how’s that Dance Studio?). Bugs are present in any game, online, or single player..

      Has MWO development been slow? Sure, I can’t argue with that.. I’d love to see things coming out at a faster pace.

      Has PGI had issues? Yup, but, they’ve been much better this year at hitting deadlines, communicating (especially the last month or so). They’ve shown improvement, and the game is fun, so I still play.

      As for the banning for comments on other sites, I’ve seen the claims, but there hasn’t been any actual proof (that I’ve seen), that it was an off-site comment that was responsible.


  2. MWT is done. It was nothing more than a front for theft and fraud since at least December 2013.

    It was discovered in August 2014 that they had fired Blue Lizard Games and that there had been no developer working on the game for the last 8 months. Despite this, they had been working to lure people into buying founders packs with fake update announcements on the website (and continuing to use BLG’s name and logo) to make it look like there was active development.

    Within 24 hours of one of the testers sharing this information with the others, the website was taken down.


    1. I am (was?) one of MWT’s biggest defenders, even during the periods of glacial development (which, as you’ve mentioned, we’ve now found out was NO development)… and even I can’t think of a good way for IGP to recover from this, short of them selling MWT to a new Publisher/Developer.

      I just want to know what happens to all of us that bought Founder’s packs to MWT… I have a feeling that’s money we’ll not see again.

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