I can't help but wonder why they had to kill so many jobs earlier this year. That was when we started getting more glitches, it seemed to me; right after they fired so many devs. Yeah, I guess I'm naive, but I thought the company must be in trouble.
In September 2020 MTG (Modern Times Group) made Maria Redin became President and CEO. She has an entertainment and finance background and since MTG is a publicly traded company, you only have to look at their performance in comparison to other large entertainment enterprises. The thing is, most, and I include Ms. Redin in the mix, finance officers focus on streamlining to raise profitability. They are not visionaries and do not look at the companies they control as doing this or that (their production focus), but as entities within the mix of things the holding company does. MTG is a holding company and one of the companies they hold, is Inno. Over 34% of MTG is held by 4 investment groups and they demand a certain return on investment (ROI) or better or they pull their capital (sell their shares) out. Capital is the life blood of a business and that would be bad. Very, very bad. So in all likelihood Ms. Redin took the job by presenting to the stock holders a plan by which she would raise the profitability of MTG. No doubt every candidate presented some plan and of all the plans Ms. Redin's was probably the one that seemed to those 4 investors the one most likely to succeed and thus, she got the job. She's doing her job to keep her job, no doubt. In the end, then, we are seeing a top-down management of Inno Games. Gone are the days where the company is seen by the owners as a visionary company focused and compassionate about their customer base. Now their attention has turned to the true customers of the company, the stockholders. And stockholders care about profit and share value only. The introduction of so many new features over the last few months reveals, I believe, the understanding at some level of Inno that cuts were coming and thus they had to move quickly to finish projects that may have been introduced at a slower pace but which, once introduced, couldn't be easily pulled back. I expect there to be few to no further features added to Elvenar for a long, long time.
Now, to the general question of why the move to Discord and why the closing of the forums.
On this subject there is a whole lot to like in the comments here. The distinction between a traditional forum like this one and a more "robust" messaging service/social media site is something I'll have to ferret out for myself. Right now, it looks like a big mountain to climb full of rocks and ruts over which I may stumble and tumble back down. And I do believe a lot of forum users feel that way. We've mastered getting around here, which is relatively easy but doesn't have all the confusion of the unmapped terrain we face, and thus, we would rather be here.
On the other hand, we aren't getting any younger. So, while the demographics of Elvenar players might make the climb up that mountain a bit harder for us than for a younger demographic tuned to all the white noise of social media, the average birth year of Elvenar users is always going up... which means more and more of the players are and will be perfectly fine with the short, pithy, and often rapid fire "conversations" that take place in chat fashion.
Finally, there's the economics of the thing. No doubt Discord has a marketing department, and, no doubt, they want to sell their services to somebody. Why not to Inno? Perhaps they've managed to price below whatever service is currently managing the forum? And why pay for two services when one will do, no matter how badly that "it will do" might be?
Does Inno care? Of course, they do. They care enough to calculate just how many users will be gone (or stop spending) if they do X or if they do Y. Do they listen to their customers? Of course, they do. They listen to the sound of their customers opening their wallets. The sweet sound of a credit card sliding down, in our out, or passing over their credit card machine, is the sound they want to hear. Everything else is secondary to those sounds, and that, as a business, is exactly how it should be. The only vote we get in how a business does it's business is the choice to make a purchase or not and if you continue spending, you vote for whatever Inno gives us. In the end, customers come and go based on how they feel, and the younger crowd is used to a Discord type of interaction, they will not leave but see the move as more in tune with how they use the Internet. So, it's just economics in the end, as it should be.
AJ
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