Transformers: Rise, the upcoming Console MMO Game, seems to be in trouble following managerial positions at LeYou, including its CEO Alexa Xu, leaving the company.
Popular game journalist Josh Ye who investigated the matter had the following to say in addition to his article at South China Morning Post.
“The final years of Leyou hunting for a buyout deal and the ensuing chaos have left a bad taste in the mouth of many who joined Leyou to create games based on famous intellectual properties such as Lord of the Rings and Transformers.“It has dashed the hopes of many who joined the company to create games,” one person said, “It went from having one of the best hands in the gaming business to nothing but another satellite studio for Tencent. It was a place that a PC and console gamer dreamt of working.”
In 2019, Leyou announced that it was helping Amazon to develop a game based on the Lord of the Rings franchise. In the same year, it said that it was developing Transformers Online for US toy giant Hasbro and Civilization Online with 2K Games for the PC and console platform. Multiple persons said that the overhaul at the company has now led to multiple cancelled projects which would incur heavy penalties for Leyou over breached deals with partners.
Ex-Leyou employees said that the company’s ambition to assert itself in the gaming business was thwarted by mismanagement and internal infighting. “People who did not care about games wound up being in charge. It was more interested in dressing itself up for a sale, and they did so by buying famous IPs with which they never intended to go through,” a person said.”
You can read the full statement, after the jump.
News Post image: LeYou CEO Alexa Xu prior to leaving the company.
“Just months after Tencent, acquired Leyou Technologies in a US$1.5 billion cash deal, Leyou has become a shell of its former self, marking a rare move by Tencent which prides itself on its hands-off approach with subsidiaries and investments.
Leyou, a former poultry meat supplier to McDonald’s but later became touted as China’s hope in console and PC games, has cancelled a number of tentpole titles including a Lord of Rings game with Amazon Games and a Civilization game with 2K Games despite penalty fees numbering in the tens of millions dollars. The company, previously owned by tycoon Charles Yuk Kwok-cheung, also saw many of its top senior leaders leaving including the company’s chief executive and creative director, according to sources.
The final years of Leyou hunting for a buyout deal and the ensuing chaos have left a bad taste in the mouth of many who joined Leyou to create games based on famous intellectual properties such as Lord of the Rings and Transformers.“It has dashed the hopes of many who joined the company to create games,” one person said, “It went from having one of the best hands in the gaming business to nothing but another satellite studio for Tencent. It was a place that a PC and console gamer dreamt of working.”
However, the deal gave Tencent what it really wanted: the option to invest into and own Certain Affinity, the Texas-based developer key to the development of Call of Duty, Halo and other AAA titles. Leyou has a 20% stake in CA, an industry darling for last-min crunch work. Certain Affinity is also a key reason why Sony joined the bidding war with Tencent as the company entails significant strategic importance for the gaming industry.
Following the deal with Tencent, Leyou’s chief executive Alex Xu left the company in May and so did multiple other managers of the company. Its creative director Michael Kiessling left last year.
“A huge number of the people who were at Leyou have left. The company used to have teams based in Beijing and Shanghai,” a person said, “It had a team of about 200 people working on the Civilization Online game at one point across multiple cities in China. Now Civilization Online is no more and so are the teams working on it.”
In 2019, Leyou announced that it was helping Amazon to develop a game based on the Lord of the Rings franchise. In the same year, it said that it was developing Transformers Online for US toy giant Hasbro and Civilization Online with 2K Games for the PC and console platform. Multiple persons said that the overhaul at the company has now led to multiple cancelled projects which would incur heavy penalties for Leyou over breached deals with partners.
Ex-Leyou employees said that the company’s ambition to assert itself in the gaming business was thwarted by mismanagement and internal infighting. “People who did not care about games wound up being in charge. It was more interested in dressing itself up for a sale, and they did so by buying famous IPs with which they never intended to go through,” a person said.”
ToaDraco
The only point for Devastation over WfC and FoC for me is that Wheeljack is playable in the campaign. Wheeljack was playable in multiplayer and Escalation in FoC and RotDS but since High Moon/Activision were morons, even playing Escalation single player required a friggin' server login which disapeared the second the servers were shut down. It's too bad, I loved that Wheeljack design. I'm still hoping Planet X gets around to it some day but I haven't heard anything from them in awhile. Hopefully they're still in business.
Anyway, as long as this game lets me play as Wheeljack, I'll be happy. Hopefully the game is still happening and ends up being good but chances aren't great.
mx-01 archon
As I've made mention over the course of this thread, in this day and age, I feel that's not particularly likely unless Hasbro decides to invest on a game studio of their very own.
AAA-level licensed games are all but dead outside of the largest, most lucrative brands nowadays (and even then, they're much fewer and farther between). It's not worth it to the developers to invest in them, because they can't own any of the assets they create for them.
Soundlips
I agree, I dont think Hasbro even thought about something like this happening but it did. The most important factor now is how much of the game is complete. If it was a good way complete, then it is entirely in the realm of possibility to add another support studio to finish and find a new publisher, but if it's not near completion and Hasbro isn't satisfied with the progress, then I think they will cancel the project, sue Leyou and Tencent for breach of contract, and try and make their money back while leaving Certain Affinity and Splash Damage out to dry.
The problem is that we, the fans, are jumping to conclusions on both sides using breadcrumbs, when we truly dont know enough to even come close to a definitive answer. Only time will tell what will actually happen, but logically looking at what info we do have, all signs point to a troubled development and more negative than good.
I will gladly be made of fool of if the game does work out in the end and is good, but right now that seems very unlikely.
B u m b l e b e e
Yeah, it looks pretty grim and Leyou buying the licence with the intention just to look good doesn’t help either. But it’s not impossible for the game to continue and that’s enough for me.
I also believe that Hasbro wouldn’t want to give up such a key marketing component for the brand leading into next year. Unlike previous console games, last time we checked, this game was supposed to have an important synergy with the toys (presumably the new upcoming Generations trilogy and ROTB). Certain Affinity should have a playable game by this point and if Hasbro sees it’s damn near finished, I’d bet they’d find a way to not miss a business opportunity after almost 4 years.
Tencent is the make it/break it part of this equation. I’m sure their goals don’t align much with Hasbro’s.
Soundlips
Just because it's big, doesn't mean a lot to companies nowadays. I mean, look at every game Amazon tried to make, they dumped a shit load of money into it, then part way through they just straight up said eh and canned pretty much every game they were working on. It sounds like Tencent is the same, they care more about the money than gaming. I would not be surprised one bit if for one reason or another they decided this game wasn't gonna make them bank and they canned it. There's just too much drama behind this game and every game I have heard of similar issues, have ended up being nothing but straight dumpster fires.
That's how I have felt more and more as time goes on, and I am lying if I said I wasn't heavily concerned about the future of this game. Massive behind the scenes and severely troubled development, nine times out of ten end up being a catastrophe.
Autobot N
Please, I just want a decent Transformers console game. I liked Rise of the Dark Spark so my standards aren't even that high
snokoan
The only thing I can think of soon for a gaming event is the Sony one but I have no clue what's going on with them first it was the end of August then September then they went quiet
snokoan
I don't think it's canceled it just wouldn't make sense for them to years in the making only to be canceled because companies doing helicopters. I have that feeling inside that says to me its not but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I'm worried.
RKillian
One of the reasons that I cannot watch through Japanese G1 is that they replaced the modern warfare with sword dueling. Why have robots that turn into jets and dinosaurs that can fly and shoot lasers and use special powers when they just fight hand-to-hand on the ground all the time? That's exactly what happened with Devastation. Everything cool about being a TransFormer went right out the window so they could punch generics with slightly altered palettes like it was Final Fight or Streets of Rage. Booooring.
(Not that I don't like those games but it was such wasted potential with the TF license.)
B u m b l e b e e
Nowhere does it state the game is cancelled. It's just in a realm of uncertainty. Of course, like many people, they'll choose to say it is since the information is ambiguous. Either way, for a project this big (budget, development time, etc), the public will find out eventually. We discover Transformers games getting cancelled before people can even play it all the time albeit never close to this scale.
Autobot N
Devastation also doesn't let you play as Air Raid, which is a point against it (and FOC for that matter)
octobotimus
80% of games that get cancled are never announced to the public.
SilverOptimus
This is exactly why I stopped playing Devastation halfway through, yet replay WFC/FOC from time to time. On Devastation, High-speed, floaty action didn't evoke the feeling of weighty robots to me. But other games from Platinum such as the TMNT one, feels right with high-speed ninja action.
ToaDraco
While technically true, WfC has vastly more interesting environments, it actually feels like a lived in world, way better story, you could play as Autobots and Decepticons, you also had playable flying characters, way better music and sound design, and tighter, more impactful combat. I love Platinum Game's style action but it's floaty and you don't really feel the impact of your blows. Devastation was fun but the environments were incredibly bland and uninteresting with very little variation. It's easy to get lost in the "city" as nice as it was to be able to explore around a little bit. The complete lack of any npcs, just you and some enemies made the world feel empty and unfinished. You can't even run around with the other playable characters with you to make it feel more like a team adventure. In WfC you do have that and it adds a lot imo. Plus there are other characters and creatures that populate the world and you can look around and see fighting taking place in the distance. I love that kind of world building and environmental storytelling. Plus the game isn't relegated to one small chunk of city like Devastastion. You go on missions all over Cybertron.
Yes the levels were linear but I happily go back and replay WfC and FoC on a regular basis because I love being in that world with those iterations of the characters. I've replayed Devastation with every character for the trophies and I don't anticipate ever touching it again outside of maybe the challenge missions just for the trophies. It's just not a fun world to be in, after the 2nd playthrough the rest felt like a massive chore.
Also, you realize saying they're the same because you fight guys in one room then go to another room and fight some more guys covers 90% of all games.
PlanckEpoch
I mean…isn't that what the WfC games did?
Go to a room, shoot up some guys. Go into another room, shoot up more guys. Sometimes you did it on a turret.
WfC games weren't big exploratory based shooters like classic Doom or Quake. It's a move from acne to scene shooting things up. The games played linearly every time. Your criticism of Devastation literally fit WfC too.
Soundlips
I would, or at least severely question it. This really doesn't point to a whole lot. Yes, they were working on transformers, but they also were working on two new in house IPs, a survival game and a completely unknown one. Not to mention they are helping out other studios, so this very well could be a game they are just helping out with like Halo.
I mean anything is possible, but so much has happened behind the scenes that has severely negatively impacted the game that it is totally understandable and in the realm of possibility to question if this game is gonna make. I am not trying to be overly negative about it, but at this point, it is really hard to avoid the signs of a very troubled development. I mean hell, the only definitive answer we've really had for awhile that this thing is still maybe a thing is the Transformers Rise domain being taken, and even that could very easily just be something related to the movies and not the game and we just jumped to conclusions because we want this game so badly to happen.
Another worry I had, is that the game is still happening, but since Leyous work on it is nonexistent, Certain affinity too busy, and Splash damage not able to fully dev a AAA game solo with no publisher, that this game gets sent off to a third party studio and the game sucks donkey balls. And if this was the case, I would say just can the whole project because we have had enough bad games the past few years and I'd rather wait even longer for a good one.
Total shot in the dark; if this was for some reason a weird rumor they spread to get the fans to stop pestering them every five seconds, I would call that a bad move on their part because they need as much exposure as possible to reel fans back into Transformers.
Frosty Coffee
I wouldn't vote this game off just yet. A ton of money has been poured into this project alone. It would be of very little benefit to Tencent if they purchased companies only to let them die. If anything I would expect them to invest into companies that hold big name IPs such as Transformers. Considering their previous game that didn't fly very well with Tencent Games using the name Transformers Online. Now that Tencent has joined with these companies, we can only hope that an agreement will be made between Tencent, Hasbro, Leyou Technologies and Certain Affinity. Otherwise, its possible Certain Affinity could hand off the project to a different company like they did with Bioshock 4 giving the game off to Cloud Chamber Studios. It is completely up to Hasbro if they come to an agreement on what happens next. Certain Affinity is still hiring for positions. We will just have to wait and see what happens with the contract that is still in place.
Yodoswaginz
I hope so. I hope it's good too. It might still be happening and just be bad.
Rodimus Prime
"Tencent"
Into the trash it goes.
B u m b l e b e e
The news may be alarming but none of this is set in stone as far as we know. Wait for an official announcement or confirmation before you guys start jumping to conclusions.