Congratulations to Monumental for another aquisition! Very curious as to where boundless falls within the scope but excitedly waiting to see the big long term picture.
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Yup this is already out there.
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I didn’t see that since I don’t have boundless installed and haven’t been keeping up with what is going on “in boundless”.
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It does deserve a separate topic though, rather than being a lengthy OT somewhere else.
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Yup and maybe just maybe some big picture perspective as I am sure this all ties into each other. Maybe?
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I’m so confused, like… Didn’t they just lay off a bunch of people from Crowfall? I guess not because they don’t have money? If they have money, I guess that makes me more hopeful that the reason nothing has been happening is because Wonderstruck is still dragging feet on the transition.
There have been other nuggets of hope around too.
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I took a closer look at who was let off and it looks like it was connected with the suspended Crawfall servers and probably lengthy Boundless transfer. So, most likely short term team trimming and readjusting it to current needs.
I wouldn’t read much to it in terms of their medium/long term plans.
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Like I mentioned elsewhere, at least the money is there. I always felt Boundless had potential for the niche audience it would cater to.
However, I do wish Monty would share what his overall plans are for Boundless, Crowfall and Kongregate. I don’t mean to share that with me personally, but publicly just say what some of the plans are. I’ll keep playing the game and take breaks when needed, I’d just love to see some plan, roadmap or even a mention of having big plans for Boundless.
Regardless, congratulations @monty1
Quick side note: IIRC Kongregate sold for $55mil in 2017
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I’m not sure if it’s on purpose or not. But via the information available, the only devs still at Wonderstruck are James, Leah, and Blake.
And they have other jobs now, which probably limits how much they can do and why it’s taking so long.
Last I saw, James is listed as the head of the U.K. division of Larian Studios.
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It’s not as simple as “having money” vs “not having money”.
When considering an acquisition, a company will make a commercial calculation: does purchasing this game bring us in more money than we will have to spent to maintain it (running the servers, responding to support issues etc).
The fact that Monumental were willing to purchase Boundless indicates that they at least expected it to be mildly profitable, but this does not mean that they are making enough money from it to be worth allocating a team of developers to implement new features and enhancements.
I don’t believe that “transition” is the problem. They’ve had more than enough time to take over the codebase and start developing it, if that was what they wanted to do.
The fact is, this game was in Maintenance Mode before the transition and it’s in Maintenance Mode now. The best we can hope for is that they make enough money from it to cover the cost of keeping it running, but I’m not holding my breath that there’s going to be any kind of future development unless the game suddenly becomes massively popular.
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Considering the recent tax changes surrounding R&D in the USA and with the IRS designating of all software development to be R&D (thus requiring it be amortized over 5 years versus the more reasonable accounting of expensing the R&D in the year wages were paid) the recent dev layoffs are just the tip of a very massive and rapidly melting iceberg. Expect more layoffs and no future software development of any kind in the USA, except by companies with very deep pockets (Google was already amortizing its R&D), until the laws making those rule changes are reversed… cf F3115 effective Jan 1 2022
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Monumental looks more and more like they want to be the next Gamigo :-/
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