I knew you were trouble when you walked in: upcoming Colonialesque sandbox MMO Salem has parted from underneath the wings of publisher Paradox, and has gone independent, leaving all of the development work with Seatribe, its two-man dev team. We contacted Paradox to see if they have a particularly Taylor Swift view of things.
Chief Marketing Officer at Paradox InteractiveSusana Meza Graham posted on behalf of Seatribeon their forum about the break from Paradox:
“Effective from July 8, Seatribe will assume full support management and development ownership of Salem: The Crafting MMO. Any decisions taken from that point on will be taken by and communicated through Seatribe to you – the community. Paradox Interactive will start phasing out their involvement in the project from today and on July 8 the game for all intents and purposes will be Seatribe’s to run.
We firmly believe this decision is in the best interest of Seatribe, Paradox Interactive and absolutely for the community as you will have a development team working even more direct with you and the game. “
We emailed Paradox to ask if there was trouble, trouble, trouble.
Susana expanded on the issues. “The way we see it, most of the necessary infrastructure and development investments in the game have already been made over the course of these past couple of years. Currently the game and its development is chugging along and making a decent profit looking at it from a standpoint of it being run by a smaller dev team like Seatribe. If you look at it from a standpoint of what it would need to generate as part of the Paradox portfolio and for the Paradox team to be involved, we would need it to scale a bit quicker than it is at the moment.”
Basically it is taking AGES to make and Paradox are like, totally buggin’.
“Rather than killing the project because it’s not meeting our marginal, and since all necessary investments to run this game have already been made, we agreed with Seatribe that they can assume management of it. We realize this approach taken by a publisher might be a bit “unorthodox” , but we’ve all invested time and energy into Salem and really want to see it live on at the hands of the developers.”
I hope Salem doesn’t descend into ergotism whilst Paradox are gone. “For all intents and purposes, there should be no visible difference for the player when it comes to their Salem experience,” Susana says, reassuringly.
Hopefully Seatribe survives the break up okay. Send ice cream.