MMO fails to perform for the umpteenth time.
Tag: Champions of Titan
Champions Of Titan Is Back For Round 3 (In Chinese)
No localized in English, unfortunately.
Continue reading “Champions Of Titan Is Back For Round 3 (In Chinese)”
Champions of Titan Is Shutting Down A Second Time
[Column] Champions of Titan, or, Schrödinger’s MMO
What is an MMO? A miserable pile of microtransactions.
Today I’d like to talk about Champions of Titan, or my preferred title; Schrödinger’s MMO. You may recognize Champions of Titan by its previous namesake Wild Buster. Wild Buster along with Guardians of Ember and a few other titles were removed from the Steam store where it was hosted under publisher Insel Games after it came to light that the CEO was manipulating reviews in order to gin up more sales. Insel Games has since gone on to exist in a mostly vegetative state, while its published games were either shut down or spun off to new companies.
Case in point being today’s topic. Wild Buster was spun off to IDC Games whose name does not, as it turns out, stand for “I Don’t Care.” It might, since a quick browse through the forums of many games that IDC publishes comes up with two major topics: The server performance is terrible and customer support is virtually nonexistent, and more than one of the forums just flat out wouldn’t load when I tried to boot them up.
Champions of Titan is alive and well, in a theoretical sense. In a practical sense, it doesn’t seem like the game has been properly functioning in quite some time. People are logging in to find that the game client no longer works, what with there being no character selection screen.
Now comes the hard part: How long exactly has the game been broken and is it broken for everyone? The answer to the second question is evidently no, as the earliest complaint that I found on the forums discussing the above issue dates back to October 21, however another player posted a first impressions piece on December 13. There are multiple threads discussing the fact that the game doesn’t work going through the end of July with sporadic comments from staff asking players to contact customer support.
It seems to be the case that nobody is really trying to play the game so the number of people getting rejected from the client not working is virtually none with even less willing to go on the forums and complain about it. I got a response from the IDC people after submitting a ticket that they are aware of the situation, and you would imagine that the game just being wholly inaccessible would be a major priority to be fixed right away, but after a week since my report and ten months since the earliest report, it’s apparently not the case.
But that’s just my opinion on the whole thing.
Whatever Happened To: Insel Games?
It’s been nearly a year and a half since we talked about Insel Games here at MMO Fallout, so I thought why not check in and see if they even still exist?
The last time we talked about Insel Games was in February 2018 when the company did something very, very stupid. Insel Games popped up a few years back to crowdfund the western releases of Wild Buster and Guardians of Ember, two top-down ARPG titles that performed fine enough on Indiegogo. Wild Buster raked in roughly $13k and Guardians of Ember a slightly more impressive $80k. Wild Buster even boasted Serious Sam and Duke Nukem among their character roster.
I’ll let Insel Games describe themselves:
“InselGames is a small independent publisher of online games based in Malta. Members of our team have worked on games such as Last Chaos, Fiesta Online, S4 League, Florensia, Everquest 2 and Planetside 2. Our goal is to bring you the best independent MMOs with a fair business model (TLDR: no pay-to-win)!”
I know what you’re thinking: What was this big stupid thing that Insel Games did? Well, the CEO got caught attempting to manipulate Steam reviews for Wild Buster after the title didn’t meet initial expectations and Valve gave the company the big boot. All of Insel Games titles were removed and the developer was banned from the store front. However it happened, Insel Games lost or gave up the publishing rights to both Guardians of Ember and Wild Buster. Guardians of Ember transferred to GameForge while Wild Buster renamed itself Champion of Titans and moved over to IDC Games.
You might be thinking that Insel Games just dissolved and died off, what with their getting banned from the largest PC game store and losing what few titles they had publishing rights to, and you would kinda be right. Right now the Insel Games website has two titles listed under “Our Games” with no mention of their prior published titles. The first game is World of Fishing which some of you may vaguely remember. World of Fishing shut down two years ago with players receiving free keys to Guardians of Ember as compensation. Whoops.
The other game appears to be titled MAD: Revenge of Narc. The website notes that this is a working title, but I’m assuming that it too is dead. I can’t find any mention online of an MMO with this name, and reverse searching the three screenshots on their website also doesn’t turn up any results. The Malta business registry similarly doesn’t have any status listed for the company.
So it looks like Insel Games is basically dead, assuming their domain isn’t simply waiting for whatever funds have already been invested in it to dry out.
Wild Buster Relaunching Under New Publisher As Champions of Titan
Wild Buster hasn’t had such great success on Steam, especially after Valve severed its ties to Insel Games over that whole fraudulent review fiasco and removed their entire library from the platform. In response to the lack of simoleons flowing in and likely several angry phone calls with developer Nuri Works, Insel Games has agreed to transfer publishing rights to a new company, IDC Games who will relaunch Wild Buster under the new moniker Champions of Titan.
Unfortunately this means that all of your progression is going to be wiped.
With these changes also comes the necessity for a server wipe and new game client which means that all character progress will be reset and you need to re-register your account. While this might sadden some of you it simply is the best way to ensure a fair start for everyone and a growing community from the point of the re-launch.
Those who backed Wild Buster have been promised compensation in the form of rewards for the upcoming Champions of Titan relaunch.
(Source: Steam)
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