Board Thread:Announcements/@comment-16922870-20170304215241/@comment-24146651-20170321162529

What if FISHLABS was going for that all along?

I have a theory that FISHLABS, on the precipice of the beauty that was GoF2, didn't intentionally want GoF3 to be different. At all.

Originally, I made the claim that GoF3 is the way it is because FISHLABS was bought by Deep Silver. But now, I've come to realize; they have simply been moving with the meta to get GoF3 onto the charts and to keep them alive. To prevent them from making the same mistake that they made with GoF2 which led to the unholy GoFA.

Think about it for a second. How many games remotely like GoF2 are on the App Store that really, truly had the gameplay that it has and not cost an astronomical price? Not many. In fact, GoF2 is free now, with it's lite version completely off of the market. (Granted, it has iAPs, but they're not necessary to beat the game; and, according to me because I've done it, iAPs aren't necessary to beat GoF3, either. Yeah, GoF3 takes a lot of farming to complete, but you can't tell me you never had to farm missions in GoF2 to get some ship or other.)

The biggest mistake FISHLABS made with GoF2 is relying on it as its major source of income. GoF2 was a pay once, play forever game. The only one that was really, truly successful. Most companies that develop games like these keep developing more of them rapidly. Because if you're going to rely on a pay-once game then you can't rely on a one-hit wonder. Galaxy on Fire - as a franchise - was just that; a one-hit wonder. No other franchise developed by FISHLABS was as huge as this.

Now, one could make the argument that that only meant they should have developed GoF3 faster, but take into consideration the following.

They had created two extensions to Galaxy on Fire 2 which were also pay once, play forever, and their last one came with the Android version of the game in 2013. Very shortly after, they went into financial trouble. What does a company do when they run into financial trouble? They lay off employees; coders, developers, sound designers. This makes your overall production line slower.

Gradually, as it got slower and slower, it got harder to push out more content for GoF2 on top of pushing out maybe another game they wanted to make. As a last resort, GoFA was developed and released, in the hoped that it would bring in cash. It did.. but not for very long. All of this ultimately led them to file bankruptcy, seemingly ending the Galaxy on Fire story right then and there.

Then came in Deep Silver to save the day, to give them a chance at redemption. When they came back, I can only imagine, after everything they've been through, that to continue their old ways would not keep them in business. So they migrated. They adapted their style to the games of today. Now, with games like Warp Shift and Galaxy on Fire 3 offering extensions and iAPs, they are doing what everyone else would do; bring in money, sometimes by force. Not because they wanted to, but because they had to.

Their intentions were never to force us to pay to win - and yes, there were plenty of other ways to go about it - but the fact is that the only way to resurface was to do what everyone else did. They have no intention of falling to a one-hit wonder again, and that's respectable.

Okay, text wall done. Hopefully you enjoyed the story.

NiveliKing My Wall 16:25, March 21, 2017 (UTC)