9 minutes ago, FTS Gecko said:You're absolutely right, the miniatures / board & card game split was planned a long while back.
Unfortunately, plans can change, and unfortunately, 2020.
There were mass layoffs at FFG before COVID-19 became an issue.
The big, successful and above all licensed products have been handed across to a different studio, again with more layoffs.
Organised Play has also lost key staff and is all but shut down for the foreseeable future.
Now the forums are being shut down, not just for the "Star Wars Three", but for all FFG products.
With normality still a long way off, it isn't take a massive leap of logic to think that Asmodee may be about to have a fire sale, or are otherwise scaling down operations.
Yeah, the pandemic certainly took an already planned contraction and exacerbated it. Asmodee USA's head had already spoke about a planned reduction of product lines before the pandemic hit, and once it happened, competitive games basically fell off the face of the earth since most social gatherings outside personal bubbles stopped, and in many places, became illegal. Actually trying to run Organized Play events could be almost akin to Prohibition-era speak-easies, so no reason to keep that group around from a larger view.
As far as the forums, I've kind of got the feeling that when the decision to move the product lines to AMG came up, someone mentioned, "Okay, what are we going to do with the forums for those games?" and the reply from Asmodee USA was, "What forums? We're paying for forums in 2020?" and here we are.
I mean, Asmodee USA has shown a complete different ideal to customer service and customer engagement compared to FFG (see the replacement part fiasco), so its not surprising to me that they are shutting down the forums. Its just another sad aspect of Asmodee USA taking a larger control of FFG, no longer allowing it to act autonomously, but viewing FFG and its games as another commodity in its portfolio that it can part and parcel out as it needs.