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the most handsome guy in staff of Mmosite LOL (my personal opinion) |
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Australian developer Auran has announced it has entered into voluntary administration and let all staff members go, just a day after announcing that massively multiplayer online game Fury would change to a free-to-play rather than subscription based business model.
A statement from company CEO Tony Hilliam said that "The Directors of Auran Developments, the company that employs all the Auran staff, have today called in a Voluntary Administrator (like Chapter 11 in the US). All the staff were dismissed today."
"Despite earlier reports," he continued, "staff will be paid for all their work to date, their annual leave entitlements, redundancy payments and long service leave." The news follows last week's reports that the company was forced to downsize its 60 man team following the slow start for Fury and new outsourcing to Asia.
At the time, Hilliam said that after a ramp up from 30 to 70 staff members to complete Fury and its Battlestar Galactica XBLA game it had made some cutbacks to "focus on a smaller, more agile core team of Fury developers."
This was reiterated in the most recent report as well, saying that with the launch of its latest content
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Just got word from Turbine that they are offering a 7-day free trial of The Lord of the Rings Online. Beginning today, people from North America, Aussie, and Kiwi land can play the game for free if they go to this page. And now for the standard catch: "At the end of the trial, players will have the option to continue to play LOTRO, and keep the characters created during their 7-day free trial time, by purchasing the game either online or at retail."
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While the virtual asset/microtransaction/free-to-play models are met with suspicion and derision in some quarters, Free To Play has an interesting analysis up of the challenges facing more traditional channels in the face of declining profit margins and an up-and-coming generation of gamers raised on the Club Penguin and MapleStorys of the world. "North American game companies are taking the same "partner and acquire" approach that they've used to achieve growth and purchase innovation for the last two decades," a model that doesn't work when dealing with some of the Asian companies have theoretical purchase prices that are astronomical. Shanda's market cap today is $2B. It's not far-fetched to assume their purchase price might be close to $3B. The only companies with that kind of cash on hand are EA and Microsoft .... Netease (NTES) has a market cap of $ 2.06B. The9's (NCTY) market cap is $ 1.14B. Nexon is privately held, but with $ 235M in revenue two years ago, they won't be cheap either. The point is, there aren't many deals left among the virtual goods establishment.
The billion dollar question is: Where will these numbers be next year? Or in 2-3 years?
My gut says that in two ye
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