Obsidian dismisses some of the employees who worked on Armored Warfare. This is related to the solution Mail.Ru Group to move part of the development to Moscow.
“This week we notified some of our Armored Warfare developers that they will be laid off early next year. The publisher of Armored Warfare decided to move part of the development to its headquarters in Moscow. We are still very proud of Armored Warfare and all the work we have done and will do on it in the future. None of our other projects will be affected by this situation,” said Feargus Urquhart, CEO of Obsidian.
As for Mail.Ru Group, then she explains the postponement of development by the release of the game in new territories: “Together with the Obsidian team, we made a joint decision next year to distribute the efforts to develop the Armored Warfare game differently. The Armata Project”. This is due to the fact that the game is already being published in a large number of markets, and now it is planned to enter new territories, for example in China.”
The scale of the cuts is unknown. The answer to how the roles in the development of the fritupley tank shooter were distributed between Obsidian, Mail.Ru Group and Denver IllFonic, as well as how the companies will work with each other in the future, – App2Top.ru I didn’t get it.
According to the results of the second quarter of 2016, Armored Warfare was the second most profitable game Mail.Ru Group, despite the fact that it was still (and is still) at the stage of open beta testing. Its audience at that time numbered 5.8 million players (the main competitor of the game – World of Tanks – has 110 million of them).
The desire to translate the development in Russia may be due to the fact that the number of specialists competent in the development of such projects is greater here. In Moscow, it is really possible to take in the production of people who previously worked on both the already mentioned World of Tanks and War Thunder. Moreover, in October at Mail.Ru Now there is a team capable of advising in the development of such games – we are talking about Pixonic acquired for $30 million, demonstrating a consistently high box office result in the international mobile market.
Sources: Mail.Ru Group, Gamasutra