Advertisement
Guest User

Artix's open letter to the community

a guest
Feb 27th, 2018
8,505
0
Never
Not a member of Pastebin yet? Sign Up, it unlocks many cool features!
text 6.91 KB | None | 0 0
  1. Nov 2015 - Open Letter to the AE Community
  2.  
  3. Dear Friends, Players & Community,
  4.  
  5. Artix here. I am embarrassed to admit I wrote, deleted and rewrote this letter 5 times.
  6.  
  7. Truth is, it has been a really rough year for Artix Entertainment. We are an indie game studio. Most people do not know what this really means. But I have been reading the posts and tweets of our most dedicated and loyal players, and I think our community has grown and is ready to handle this. I am going to pull back the curtain and tell you 100% of what has been happening behind the scenes these past few years. You deserve to know everything. I mean, everything.
  8.  
  9. It has always been my belief that our family friendly game studio, like myself, should always maintain a positive, optimistic, and cheery image. Like a Disney park, any internal problems should be dealt with discreetly and tactfully as not to upset all the people who are enjoying themselves. They are there to have a good time after all. This is why we have always handled things this way. It was not an illuminati-esque conspiracy theory. It was our simple rule: Your happiness always comes first. So, it is really hard for me to write this letter… which will focus on all things negative. I hope that you respect what I am doing here for you.
  10.  
  11. Our community is close-knit. We are a heck of a lot more like a family than some themepark. Many of you reading this were single-digit years old when you started playing our games and are now the legal drinking age. So our dedicated players have already figured out most of the things I am going to say before they even read it. Before we dive in, it is important to keep in mind that we have created and released 7 major web-based games together over an astonishing 13 years. We have over 40 employees and an incredible number of volunteers. Of course we have had ups and downs. Very few studios survive the troubles of a single year, let alone 13.
  12.  
  13. I am going to tell you it exactly as it is, but not worse than it is. This year was terrible.
  14.  
  15. We had layoffs in the Summer. For the 6 months prior, we cut deeply into our studio’s backup savings. I was the first one to give up my salary. Galanoth did the same. We cut our ad budget to basically nothing, reduced our network costs by over 50%, and dropped everything non-essential service and cost we could... but it was not enough. The worst moment of my life was when I was looking at a list of names and had to determine who we could keep and who we could not. You never, ever want to be in that position.
  16.  
  17. What happened? Three things in rapid succession. 1st. Google changed its search algorithm 3 times. Every time it did, we lost search engine ranking and our traffic dropped by about 20%. 2nd. Flash, the plugin our existing games run on, had a lot of problems and was blocked and then disabled-by-default on major browsers. Finally, 3rd. Mobile. The massive migration to mobile has been picking up speed since last year. The end result? Both our traffic and sales dropped over 50%. Ultimately, mobile (and our lack of having a real presence on it) is the biggest challenge facing Artix Entertainment.
  18.  
  19. Truth: We are an indie game studio. We do not have some giant corporation backing us. The team, their families and children are directly impacted by what happens here. So, when you saw those overly aggressive Membership/in-game currency pushes those past few months… that was not greed. That was the game teams working harder than ever to fight for their survival.
  20.  
  21. Because we did those difficult things that we had to do, the games are now stable. And by difficult things, I mean the loss of valued team members including Dioz, Nulgath, Beleen, Sorcikat (our office manager), the guy who played Chairman Platinum (who actually made all our props) and administrative staff. Also, many important part time developers gave up their monthly draw and are now continuing to work as volunteers.
  22.  
  23. Not everyone has chosen a graceful exit. The hottest topic of angst recently was the very upsetting public exit of the former DragonFable volunteer, Ash. Now, I am going to defend Ash here. He worked incredibly hard on DragonFable and MechQuest for our community. He should not have been working that much as a volunteer. What he was doing directly reflects how hard all of the AE team works on a weekly basis. That is literally what it takes to do what we do. This is not a cushy 9 to 5 lifestyle. Walk into the lab on a Friday night at 9PM and count how many people are still staring at the glow of their monitors. It would shock you. We love making games, and we actually care about them. That is the driving force of why we do what we do. Ash was in a situation where he really needed a full time job. He asked for one. He certainly deserved it. But we were not in the position to give him what he needed at that exact moment. He did not know what happened in the summer, or what a terrible situation we were in. Now, I said that exact moment because we were certainly not done trying to work something out. We were trying to setup a sit down and talk meeting between us, but it kept getting pushed back due to the pressing deadlines of the Undead Assault release and the AQWorlds Cruxshadows event. I thought we finally had a meeting lined up for the following week, which is why I was pretty surprised (to say the least) to read the rage-quit letter he posted. I also noticed he failed to mention that I had previously offered him a % of dragonfable sales as a temporary solution. I tried calling him several times, but he never picked up. I get it. He must have felt really hurt-- and I feel terrible for not being able to fix it. If I could go back in time I know what I would have done differently to prevent this from happening. But just to make sure you and I are clear on what really happened: He needed a full time job, and if he had gotten it when he needed it, he would have been so crazy happy. But just because he did not, he posted a scathing rant online burning his bridges. I would sincerely advise anyone in a similar situation to take a more professional approach. Although, if he asked I would still give him a great recommendation. This week we are working on getting a full time lead programmer in place for DragonFable.
  24.  
  25. So, one last thing. Even when we are in dark times, you will see me standing tall, smiling and confidently believing in what we are doing. Why? Why not rant and spread misery? Well, it is easy to be negative, and it can make you look cool, but it does not produce results. If you want to make change, real positive change, you need to see it in your mind, and work really hard at it. This is what made those successes we had together before. It is the same persistence, determination, and indomitable spirit that is going to make them happen again.
  26.  
  27. Thank you for reading this. If you have questions, please let me know. I can edit this to answer them because there are probably more people with your same questions.
  28.  
  29. Battle on!
  30. Adam Bohn (Artix)
Advertisement
Add Comment
Please, Sign In to add comment
Advertisement