Star Trek Online & Neverwinter Ownership Change

Well it’s official: Star Trek Online, which along with Neverwinter and Champions Online constitutes Cryptic’s library of games, is being sold. The new buyer? A German outfit called DECA, which, if Wiki is accurate, is one of those small European gaming companies that had been scooping up older, stagnant games with steady audiences (and therefore steady cashflows). An infamously similar outfit is Gamigo, which bought out Rift a few years back and immediately put that game in maintenance mode despite making lots of promises during acquisition. Anyway, here’s a MassivelyOP article about this.

On top of that, Ten Forward weekly posted an update on this change of ownership. For historical records, I’m copying & pasting their summary here:

Ten Forward weekly 3/19/2024(All Fans! All hands)

• Short term of the transition from Cryptic to DECA will be more people involved in the game’s development.

• There’s nearly daily calls between Cryptic staff and DECA staff on things like development, roadmaps, what players want from the game, etc.

• Long term, Phil thinks Cryptic will take more of a support function as more of the primary development moves to DECA.

• Conversations with DECA began in Nov 2023. Plan is that transition would take around a year, but between hiring/training it might be longer.

• None of Cryptic’s games are going to be sunset, as per the current plan. Intent is to keep the games running a long time.

• Licenses with Paramount/Wizards last several more years.

• STO is called out every quarter for being a top performing title in Embracer’s back catalogue.

• DECA is planning to maintain the relationships with people at Paramount/Trek actors. DECA staff is being trained in that right now.

• No planned changes for STO/NW/Champion updates/modules release schedule. Current release size is rough indicator of future release sizes.

STO plans

• March 2024: New Mudd bundle with 2 popular ship picks.

• April 2024: First contact day + new Star Trek Beyond ship.

• May 2024: New Iconian event + new reward. New ship bundle T6 Dysons. New season planned for the end of the month.

• June 2024: New Mudd bundle.

Season 32: Name not finalized

• Continuation of Kings and Queens story

• 1 new episode

• 1 new TFO(an endless battle arena like Sompek)

• New ship added to Infinity Lockbox

• New event and reward

• A new feature Cryptic hasn’t done before

• Returning Star Trek VA as guest celebrity(Denise Crosby based on spoilers)

• Devlopment on next season is ahead of schedule.

• New feature one word hint is token.(seemed to be a joke)

Neverwinter plans

• Module 28: Adventure in Wildspace in April.

• Module 29 in August.

• Typical seasonal events.

Module 28

• Conclusion of Xaryxian story.

• New Wildspace landing sites.

• Vocath’s Arena of Blood.

• Imperial Citadel Dungeon.

• Mount collar refinement cost reduction.

• New Enchantment rank + enchantment refinement cost reduction.

• Battlepass repeatable tasks.

Module 29

• PC and Console in 2024.

• New setting and storyline.

• Back on Toril.

• On the Sword Coast.

• Guild UX improvements.

• + more.

• Module 29 is in early development

• Might be some cool things happen between Module 28+29

Champions Plans

• New missions and ongoing events.

• A few new missions planned for 2024, to be released alongside events.

• Normal frequency of events and contests.

• Foxbat con returns.

• New special April Fools Day surprise in the works.

• March costume content.

• Theme: to Cute to Live.

• Winners Title: Kawaii.

• Partisipants title: Adorable.

• No current plans in the near future for Cardassian/Romulan/Jem’Hadar ships.

• Cryptic had 2 games in development in 2023, one planned for 2025, another for 2027. Both games were cancelled by Embracer. Cryptic has no new games in development right now. Cryptic is in wait and see mode for Embracer’s new process for getting games greenlit.

• While DECA is known for maintaining games, but not updating them, they will be updating Cryptic games as previously stated. They are staffing up/have an org chart for significant development for these titles for some time.

• DECA is based in Berlin, but have staff worldwide.

• No plans for using AI in the game’s development(chat question)

• Cryptic is very well informed as to what is happening/the transition. People are choosing to leave for other projects, some are stepping up to take on larger roles. Phil says there will be more people leaving/coming in. Cryptic staying long term on the games will be determined by how much DECA can ramp up into production, and if they need help with stuff like servers. Short term you will see a blend of Cryptic/DECA people. What it will be like in 4 years Phil doesn’t know.

• Celestial enchantments issue on preview for Neverwinter is known, and being looked into.

• No current plans for changes for maintenance windows. Staff that does that is based in U.S./planned to stay here. Might change in the future if DECA gets the server staff spun up.

• No current plans to change engine for any of the games. Would take like 3-5 years of the games being offline to transition games to new engine.

• DECA has started looking into the feasibility of something like an Unreal port. Doesn’t mean it will happen. It depends on cost/benefit analysis.

• Cryptic has looked at what it would take to update the engine. The cost of that kind of change is millions, possibly over 10 mil. Changing the engine doesn’t automatically mean the game gets better. Would have to go through and redo all the old content to actually make the game better. Cryptic couldn’t find a case where the cost would be worth it. DECA might do their own analysis and come to a different conclusion. If they do, they will tell us.

• Phil is going to do introductions between the Paramount/Wizards staff and DECA staff to help transitions between new staff and IP holders.

• No worry about Zen/lifetime going away after the transition.

• Updates short term will be from Cryptic, Medium term Cryptic/DECA, long term we’ll see.

• Discussions are happening between Phil, and Mike, and the staff at DECA, on when the DECA community manager will make introductions. Probably in a few weeks(3 or less).

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Obviously, things like this tend to deeply divide the playerbase. There is a large number of players, especially those with Youtube channels, tend to be pessimistic and predict doom. On the flips side, there are a lot of diehard players who see this as a positive change.

In a sense, I don’t think the optimists are wrong. But based on my experience in the corporate sector, I do want to weigh in on my own humble opinion.

First of all, we should understand how companies like Gamigo and presumably DECA operate: They are not developers. They don’t have the technical know-how to do that, nor is that their business focus. They search the market for older games that are past their prime, but still generate steady cashflows because of an established playerbase. Why? Because games like these don’t require additional investments; the playerbase is, for all purposes, “captive”. They already proved that they will pump money into those games regardless of what happens. These types of games are perfect for this sort of acquisition, and Star Trek Online fits this bill perfectly.

They talk about how DECA is working closely with Cryptic in the transition, and plans to have Cryptic providing support. Yes, this sort of constant meeting and discussion and planning always, always happens over the course of any acquisition. Ten times out of ten, after the transition period is over, the original company and its staff are typically cut loose — the company I work for went through exactly this years ago, and this was after the new owner’s CEO and executive team made multiple assurances that the existing organization and staff would be kept intact. All the current assurances are corporate-speak, nothing more. I’ve heard it a dozen times in my personal work experience.

As Fungi noted, I agree that Cryptic Studios as an entity will cease to exist by November of this year.

I am also very suspicious of all the promises and plans listed in Ten Forward’s summary above. All of the soundbytes are very reminiscent of Gamigo’s promises when they acquired Rift, none of which actually materialized. Once again, if we understand the business philosophy of companies like Gamigo, we should’ve seen the writing on the wall. So yeah, all of the current rah-rah-rah is just that, all hot air and no substance.

So is it all DOOM AND GLOOM in Heidyland? Well, not totally.

The reason I’m not saying it’s DOOOOOOOOM is pretty simple: it’s no secret that in the last 3 or 4 years, Cryptic has effectively put Star Trek Online (Neverwinter and Champions Online too) in a quasi-maintenance mode. Now granted, it’s not as bad as ACTUAL maintenance mode, since they still continued to release new episodes and such, but in terms of gameplay and expansions, it’s been a big fat zero. So in that sense, I don’t think DECA will be doing any worse than Cryptic, so if anything, it’ll probably be more of the same. Of course, Gamigo infamously pushed monetization once they acquired Rift, but honestly it’s not like Cryptic hasn’t already done so with STO in the last few years. This change of ownership doesn’t feel like it’s changing the trajectory of the game, but I also think any optimism towards this being a positive change for STO is just a massive display of Hopium+Copium. The real potential unknown is what happens with the licensing agreement with Paramount/CBS will go when it expires; I would be surprised if Paramount/CBS doesn’t start shopping it around when the time comes!