Where is it?
Last March I wrote an article titled “Rift Is Totally Getting Shut Down.” I penned this and posted it because of my staunch belief that Rift was totally getting shut down. Maybe not the day I posted it, maybe not the day after, but sometime in Gamigo’s plottable future. Maybe it was the repeated lack of acknowledgement of Rift. Perhaps it was the mass layoffs on the Rift team. My conclusion:
By refusing to get ahead of the layoffs and be open and clear with the public and their community, Gamigo has told us everything we need to know. We are not going to like the plan, there is no future for Rift, and in all likelihood the date of sunset is probably already marked down to a couple of options. It’s over, and at this point it really doesn’t matter that virtually nobody believes Gamigo’s half-hearted attempt to explain how everything is going to be alright. Gamigo is just measuring Rift for the coffin and gathering whatever revenue stream it can still bring in before the funeral.
In the time since that April article, there have been zero updates of substance to Rift. Look through the post history and you’ll see one or two patch notes, a few recycled events, and a whole lot of sales on crates and cosmetics and crates and loot boxes and crates and credits and crates. Later on on April 12, I penned a follow-up; “Still Totally Shutting Down Rift.” I pointed out in this piece that Gamigo couldn’t even bring itself to occasionally acknowledge that the game is still running, like when promoting their library while shutting down other titles.
Gamigo claims Rift is contributing a “great deal” to the studio, and we know that great contributions are regularly rewarded with crippling layoffs and lack of acknowledgement. Rift means so much to Gamigo that maybe they forgot to suggest that Defiance players go check it out. Their vision was blinded by the overwhelming caring. Because they care just too much.
Well in an apparent effort to prove me wrong, back in November during their third quarter financial report Gamigo announced that Rift would receive a big update in Q1 2022. My response? I didn’t comment on it. It’s not that I think they’re lying, I just didn’t trust them to be telling the truth. Let the update come and we’ll see what happens.
MGI publishes their Q4 report on Monday, February 28 and I’m writing this article on Friday, February 25 because I’m so confident in what is going to happen that I am pre-writing the article. The Q4 report is going to come out, make absolutely no mention of Rift or the Q1 update, and Gamigo is just going to continue stuffing their head in the sand as though the calendar isn’t slowly checking off the days.
There has been no comment from the skeleton crew dev team since the original Q3 investor comment, meaning this concept has virtually no public existence other than MGI saying it’ll be great and the “first” implying more big updates to follow. Speculation that I’ve seen floating around the net is that this was Gamigo’s way of reassuring investors that they are actually doing something in the wake of multiple closures, layoffs, and getting fired as ArcheAge’s publisher. Personally I think they never had anything planned and still don’t.
It is effectively March 1 in parts of the world, and you would think that if Rift had anything ready to go for Q1 that Gamigo would have already been spinning the PR machine. At the very least we’d have dates for the public test server, or for that matter any inclination whatsoever on what the content might entail. But no, there’s nothing. I highly doubt there ever was anything. And I doubt there will be anything.
Because Gamigo is free to prove me wrong about their intentions of updating Rift, but until then I’m going to stick with my original conclusion; Rift is totally getting shut down.
MMO Fallout 