Shroud of the Avatar – Update of the Avatar #307 & #308
Greetings Friends! Not much for news on Shroud of the Avatar the past two weeks. It was good to get confirmation of one bit of news and we did have a new release as well. There was also a number of items and bundles that all expired November 30th, as well. So I bring you the following news from the past two weeks for Shroud of the Avatar:
- Confirmed – Portalarium no longer working with Travian
- Release 60 Livestream
- Crown Migration for Release 61
Confirmed – Portalarium no longer working with Travian, Tavian reducing staff and projects
If you follow us here at Ultima Codex, you would know I have reached out to Travian multiple times since they removed Portalarium and Shroud of the Avatar from their “game list” on their website. Sadly reaching out so many times garnered no response. Portalarium hasn’t given me a response on enough occasions on issues, since not long after the Kickstarter days, that I have reached out to other individuals to keep this and other issues on their radar.
However, one of the regular writers I follow over at Massively Overpowered (aka MassivelyOP). Bree Royce published, on November 28th, an article confirming info that many online content creators were unable to get an answer on for weeks. Starr Long confirmed to MassivelyOP that Portalarim “are no longer working directly with Travian,” which is exactly what many in the community had taken as reality based on Travian’s own changes to their website. Crowfall, a crowdfunded MMO still in development, was another one of the games Travian Games was a publisher for in the EU and other parts of the world. As a backer of Crowfall, I have had alot of fun with that game and put more hours into it than I have Shroud of the Avatar.
It is interesting to note that Travian has also accounced they will be reducing their staff as highlighted, just yesterday, December 2nd by Gamezone. With the ending of more than one game project and as many jobs as absolutely necessary being lost, the ending of the partnership with the struggling Portalarium, it seems to come to no surprise that Travian is having to cut back and focus on their profitable games. The fiscal and manpower investments into Portalarium and cancelled projects would take its toll on any smaller company. I do find it especially interesting that since Portalarium ended the CEO position, with Richard Garriott being only “Creative Director”, that the confirmation on the ending of this partnership came from Starr Long. However it is disturbing to note that there is zero post on the Shroud of the Avatar forums about the ending of this partnership. The one recent SotA Forum thread, which used the MassivelyOP post as the topic of discussion, was already locked down by Portalarium.
Big thanks go out to all the smaller gaming outlets online who do keep tabs on this information.
Release 60 Livestream
As always, the livestream is available on Youtube. Richard announced the ending of the “Ambassador’s program” due to the “lack of bandwidth”, though probably it is more due to lack of interest. As always there is some cringe as well for those who enjoy that.
Crown Migration for Release 61
a Forum post by Chris “Atos” Spears]
Starting in Release 61, we will be simplifying the crowns to simply be crowns rather than a specific metal type. No action is required by players and we will migrate these all during our Release 61 update window when the servers are down.
For example, if you now have 23 gold crown and 7 iron crowns, you will simply have 30 crowns after the migration. If you have crowns placed as decos, they will simply look like gold crown after the migration.
Going forward, all Obsidian potions will simple cost a crown vs a specific crown metal type.
This is just one piece of the puzzle, but it’s a significant piece. The relationship between Portalarium and Travian was always tenuous at best. Portalarium went for the short term fiscal infusion of capital but was handicapped under the agreement, with all future revenue (for the most part) going to Travian. Tie that in with a lackluster marketing campaign and things devolved from there. This is not the only mistake Portalarium made in this regard. There is another which will be forthcoming after the New Year.
Travian did do some nice things for Portalarium, but most of us never saw as much as I think most people expected, in regards to marketing. Now their main focus was not on the US audience, so I am certain there are plenty of things I never saw. However, the partnership was one a few of us questioned from the start as being bad for both companies, and it is a bit depressing for me to be right on this. The bad decisions from a design end and the bad decisions from a business and management end, combined with doubling down at times on bad decisions, has really hurt Portalarium. I continue to expect these bad decisions to continue to harm them, because I do not foresee anything changing.
Your inclination was 100% accurate on this being a bad decision for both parties. Portalarium went after the “easy” up front money ($1,000,000) while relinquishing all future EU generated revenue (up to $X amount, can’t remember how much now). That $1,000,000 didn’t last long, I can assure you, which caused a significant amount of concern within Portalarium. Why was the money being spent on these things, was a question asked by many. The number of bad decisions being made from both a design and business perspective were rampant and ignored by management when brought to their attention. In that sense, yes, there was definitely a “doubling down” on these decisions. To make matters worse, there are other issues which still have not come to light.
yeah i look forward to seeing more info come to light, PenBenda. Things always inevitably come to light, so I will be here to happily share all the news and info because backers and fans deserve to know some of this. I have reached out to a few other places to try and confirm other news and situation but to no avail, but that won’t stop me.
The rumours I’ve been given were that Portalarium simply lied about the projected revenue stream Travian and BlackSun could have expected, whose fecundity in turn were going to fund the initial bout of marketing etc. The marketing never turns up because once Travian etc saw the actual operating figures, they rapidly scaled back to avoid destroying their own business… but in the short term, the rights sold to Portalarium kept Shroud itself afloat for just a little bit longer.
We can see from the public SeedInvest that Portalarium also lied to the backers there, claiming a minimum of $5m profit, with $50m being their “optimistic” prediction, but of course it was nothing like that. They also went back and deleted the Risks warnings which included just how much debt Portalarium were carrying, and that industry analysis predicted they were unlikely to ever make a profit.
What I’ve been told is that when it became obvious Shroud was not going to succeed, Portalarium sacked all the creative staff and were focusing on polishing only in the hopes of selling the whole project to Travian or someone else. However by then Travian had enough time with the product on their own books to realise the hoped for players were never going to arrive; Remember the questionnaire that Travian sent out to get feedback? But then Portalarium tried to lie about it on the forums, and then tried to limit it to invitation only to keep the criticism out of it? That’s my personal belief as to when Travian started genuinely re-evaluating what they actually had, because they were able to get unrestricted, uncensored feedback from the actual backers and realised Portalarium were simply deceiving them (and perhaps themselves) about how it was really seen in the wider community.
The office downsize etc comes a bit later, probably because they realise now no one actually wants the game. A decent, moral company would admit it was now doomed, and stop getting the backers they supposedly care for to pump more and more of their money into digital items they’re all about to lose entirely; but Portalarium is NOT a decent company. They’ll squeeze you to the very last drop of blood to keep their delusions alive.
Lying to your investors and business partners is an invitation for a lawsuit. Unless Travian was also dumb and/or fraudulent in their business practices?
“Lying to your investors and business partners is an invitation for a lawsuit. Unless Travian was also dumb and/or fraudulent in their business practices?”
The problem is in reality, business tends to turn a blind eye to each other’s dumbness, because someone has to be the mark, the victim of a swindle, but if you look too closely at our swindles, we’ll look too closely at yours and none of us will profit tomorrow… So no one really “lies” in the business world; we just made predictions which sadly did not turn out to meet expectations, but everyone worked honestly and hard and we regret to inform you that…
Portalarium are also running over $13m in debt according to their last SEC filing that they can’t service even if they liquidated everything they own. If Shroud goes under, with any luck none of the core shysters will ever work in the industry again, so what is there to take from them even if Travian does feel like they were swindled with the revenue figures? It also won’t do their stock any good to prove they made a terrible business call by trusting Portalarium.
It’s usually either the State, the Stockholders or such an absolutely disastrous event (think Enron etc) that the law can’t look the other way which leads to legal action.
You have hinted multiple times about something so can you just tell us what is happening? Why the secrecy? You aren’t JJ Abrams. Just say it.
because unless i can confirm this person’s statements on stuff, I won’t report it as fact. Since the companies involved haven’t given me a statement, I am beholden to holding to the virtue of honesty by not spreading possible falsehoods as facts. Unlike one of the dev team members at Portalarium who said it was false that email requests to Support@ go unanswered.
I was telling PenBanda to report the info they have. If you don’t want to post it here, post it on reddit or RPG Codex or somewhere like that.
oh yeah, ppl are welcome to post info they have into the comments as best they can and if there is support to back it up, i am happy to mention it in any of my regular updates. 🙂
The problem is, the people most likely to know are likely under hellish NDA agreements in their contract. When I worked on UO as an EM, my contract with EA forbade me to even mentioned I’d worked for them until 3 years after my contract expired. They claimed the right to prevent you even having an up to date CV…
And Richard Garriott’s name still holds enormous sway within the industry; burning him in any way is unlikely to go well for you in the eyes of his fans who control access to the narrative. Hell, MassivelyOP openly let Chris Spears turn around my criminal reports and tried to claim I’d done the same to him on forums that didn’t even exist for a year after he said I’d used them to do so, and censored and insulted anyone trying to put the facts out in response. They were actively hosting libel.
As Golem says, you also have to be very careful about cross checking your sources; I personally have been given what are claimed to be private comments from some of the Shroud staff about the real conditions within Portalarium, but I can’t cross check them. I’ve passed them onto the main stream media I can still trust to verify, who can also provide the journalistic protection of anonymity if the sources wish to speak. However so far as I know, none have done so, and the only feedback I’ve been given on my own experience is that having the legal correspondence proving my claims makes them nervous about finding legal action taken against them.
And if, like myself, you do take the risk and put it out into the public domain yourself, you’re still likely to get ripped apart by the idiots who can’t admit you were telling the truth all along, the hate filled “fans”, and the evil people you’re trying to protect everyone else from in the first place.
Not everyone has the courage or strength to fight all of that simultaneously. It’s a hell of a thing to ask someone to do. But they should still do it, to the best of their ability because it needs to be done to protect your fellow gamers. It’s a public service. How many people want to do public service though? It’s never going to be many. Those who do however, are the real heroes.
“oh yeah, ppl are welcome to post info they have into the comments as best they can and if there is support to back it up, i am happy to mention it in any of my regular updates. 🙂”
Is there a secure way to get the AAA legal correspondence to you? The player base needs to know the EULA isn’t valid and Portalarium knows it isn’t, however it will of course contain the real name of myself, and my lawyer in Austin Texas, which I would of course prefer to be kept out of the media…
What would suffice as a sufficiently secure channel? A lot of us hang out on Discord, and DMs there seem pretty private. I’ve got ProtonMail as well, if you really, really want things to be encrypted.
Garriott is looking very tired…
He really does.