This is speculative reporting but according to Gamasutra, Trion has been bought out and only 25 of their 200 some employees were kept, rest let go.
Well maybe, maybe not? Gamigo is a German company that produces a ton of mobile and PC games including a lot of MMOs. They do seem to be firmly set in the “Free 2 play” (Pay to Win) style of game so there’s not a lot of hope for improvement there but they should be able to keep ArcheAge going.
The bad spot is if they really canned 175 of the current ArcheAge staff and only kept 25. That sounds like they’re just buying the game for it’s current state and not planning on much future development. ;( Who knows, maybe they just wanted Rift, no idea.
Yeah, looks like the lay-off bit is true. 
Another article with a quote from Brasse and a link to the official statements on Rift & ArcheAge forums.
thats already basically how Trion operates so doesnt sound like much will change in that regard.
XL Games develops Archeage. Trion just ran the servers and rarely had any changes from the Korean version (mostly cash shop changes). The new Hiram equipment is competitive with top-tier crafting (maybe even better with the bonuses) and is completely farmed with tiny RNG factors.
I always thought the problem was you had P2W (and cheats) supporting guilds and they could hand off or sell gear when they left. Now it’s a smaller factor with the 5.0 which will have epic level Hiram available from simple farming mobs in 3 surface regions.
Sadly though we will have even less GM and IT support to stop the griefers, abusers and hackers. We already had a major DDOS attack for 2 weeks unplayable. Then again there may be redundancy with the new owners’ staff that can do these functions.
Anyhow, looking forward to the 5.0 release and we have the some great guild facilities (i.e. trade house right on the peace line in Halcy) for making gold and even a few new OTG apps from the server we merged with!
ArcheAge might get through this, since as Reyba said, it’s not actually developed by Trion. But I fear for Rift 
Well for ArcheAge it really depends on XL if they want to continue their contract with this new publisher or not so we will just have to wait and see their stance on it. As for other Trion games im not sure how it will all that turn out, Gamigo mostly publishes Eastern MMO’s and those tend to be PTW and very grindy. So i guess we have to wait and see.
Well here’s hoping that they will continue with some decent support for AA.
That has always been my biggest concern with the Asian style “F2P” games. After investing so much real world money into a game, what happens if it changes hands or the producers/devs go away in one form or another.
Well just when you thought the news couldn’t get any worse… ;(
So we’ll have to wait and see if Gamigo actually does anything with the IP assets they bought in this deal. I wonder if they’ll keep the servers up or not in their current state?
That’s the second gaming company going for the nuclear option recently. Not good.
Yeah. So either this is an attempt to ‘rightsize’ the company, without having to go through all the pesky rules associated with it, or it’s what it originally looked like: A wholesale selling of everything to a mobile games shop.
Neither really fills me with a lot of confidence, and from the linked articles, no one really knows what’s going on either, but I’ve seen these sort of constructs plenty of times before, and they’re almost always meant to avoid certain legal battles, disavow ownership, or dodge responsibility.
We’ll see how it develops.