Star Wars Armada: Atomic Mass Games Shelves Development; Confusion Ensues
Star Wars Armada production appears to be on an indefinite hiatus and the future of the game is unclear.
Star Wars Armada is one of the best games out there right now. It’s also my personal favorite game on the market. After years of support and development Atomic Mass Games has made an announcement that has shocked fans. Let’s take a look.
What Happened
On Friday 8/20/21 Atomic Mass Games, the current developers of Star Wars Armada, posted the above notice on their Facebook page. The notice stated that they would continue to support Armada with reorganized play and reprints of products. It also states that no new product is in development. This has lead to a great deal of confusion and even anger among the fans of the games. So let’s take a closer look at what all this means.
Is Armada Dead?
A lot of people are taking this announcement as AMG saying that Armada is now dead. This is, on the face of it, not what the announcement is saying. Indeed the announcement confirms that they want to keep supporting the game. Normally when a game “dies” support for it is gone, organized play ends and the product is no longer being restocked. That does not, at least for now, appear to be the issue. So officially at least, Armada lives on.
But lets also be honest and admit that a lack of new product is a MAJOR blow to the game. Games need to have new product and releases coming out to grow and remain popular. This is an especially huge blow for the two new Clone Wars factions which are now hobbled with far smaller and less viable fleets than the other factions. Now obviously development could restart in the future, and this could just be a temporary pause. However given that it normally takes 18-24 months for a product to go from development to shelves (longer if issues like COVID pop-up) this means that even if they restart development in the near future we are unlikely to see new product out for a couple of years, and that is bad news.
Why Is This Happening? Is It Sales?
Let me just start out by saying that I don’t know why this decision was made and as of now AMG isn’t saying. A lot of people have speculated that its due to poor/slow sales on Armada, something that has been claimed about the game for years. However, I’ve seen very little evidence that this is true. There aren’t clear industry sales numbers so it is very hard to get anything concrete, but in the early years of the game it was reported to sell very well.
In addition to sales numbers, we know that this game has been historically very hard to keep in stock. The issues has generally not been with stock staying on shelves and not selling, but the lack of stock. I’ve heard from numerous stores that they can’t keep the stuff on their shelves, it comes in and sales out right away. Even checking FFG’s online store you can see that roughly half the product is out of stock right now. This includes some very core units, such as Imperial Star Destroyers, and even new releases like the Venetor. Even the $200 USD Super Star Destroyer is out of stock.
All of this points to sales not being the primary issues here. If a game is constantly sold out worldwide that does not suggest that it is selling poorly, but rather the opposite. Certainly FFG, before passing the license along to AMG, felt it was doing well enough to warrant a large Clone Wars expansion. Moreover AMG saying they are working on getting reprints out suggests they know people are buying the game. If it’s not sales, then what is the issue?
Staffing Issues?
One potential issues is simple size/staffing issues. When production and development moved form FFG to AMG about a year ago a very small amount of the FFG development staff made the transition. This has possibly left AMG overloaded and not able to handle development on all the games they’ve undertaken. On top of that Luke Eddy, the lead designer for the Star Wars games, left AMG at the end of July (not by his own choice according to his posts). He was one of the original designers of Armada. It is unclear why he departed, but this has clearly left a hole in their development team. Indeed aside from Luke, who worked on other games as well, its not 100% clear that AMG has ever had a team working on Armada.
Given the 18-24 months lag time it’s pretty clear that all the product that they’ve put out for the Star Wars games was developed before FFG moved the license over to AMG. This means that what they’ve done is released essentially completed product. With that last of that out the door, they can announce that they don’t have anything in development and never had, since its possible they just haven’t had the time or manpower to put together a team for ARMADA. If a team is put together that could signal a return to development.
Star Wars License
Another thing to note is the Star Wars license is set to expire sometime in the next few years. Hopefully Asmodee, the parent company of FFG and AMG will be able to retain it. FFG initially acquired the Star Wars license before Disney bought out Lucasfilm. Time will tell on this front.
Good Bye For Now My Love
I love Star Wars Armada, and this news has left me pretty devastated. Yes the game isn’t officially dead now, but its definitely in a shaky place. I don’t know why the choice was made. On the one hand its nice the AMG is being upfront with players, rather than leaving them to wait for months, but it would have been nice to get a little more information. I’d like to hold out hope that the game will come back, that the Clone Wars and a real version 2.0 will get finished, but I just don’t know. For now, until we get more news, I fear it’s goodbye to my real gaming love.
Let us know what you think of this news, down in the comments!
