Weekly update goes AWOL

As anyone who has played Restaurant Story for a reasonable amount of time will undoubtedly be aware, an in-game update is pushed out every Wednesday (18:30 GMT) with new content available to purchase. This has been a hallmark of the game over the years; indeed I don't believe a week has been missed since the weekly update became a regular feature.

That's until now. This past Wednesday players around the world patiently waited as usual for the release of a fresh set of decorations, perhaps some goals and maybe a sale or two. Instead there was nothing - weekly update went AWOL. The waiting game commenced, but at the time of writing we're still twiddling our thumbs. There has been no update up to this point, and no indication has been made by Storm8 as to when we can expect one to be rolled out.

There had been a couple of clues earlier in the week that something like this could happen. Firstly there was the absence of a teaser for the update on the Storm8 Blog. This was by no means a first, with teasers having occasionally been missed in the past, including a period in late 2015 where a teaser was actually a rare thing. Never on these occasions though was the update itself missing in action.

But another more compelling piece of evidence indicating that there could be trouble with the in-game update surfaced on several news sites including VentureBeat more than a week ago. It was reported that around 130 jobs were being cut by Storm8, representing approximately 54% of the company's workforce. This was soon confirmed by Storm8's CEO and co-founder Perry Tam in a statement:

"The mobile gaming industry has continued to rapidly evolve.  We believe having a leaner organization with sharper focus is essential to win in the growing $40-plus billion mobile games market. As such, we’ve made the very difficult decision to realign resources and part ways with approximately 130 talented colleagues. We truly appreciate everyone’s hard work and dedication to Storm8 over the years. Moving forward, a more streamlined Storm8 will build off a strong foundation, be better positioned to support our existing games and successfully bring new games to market. We remain very excited for the future of mobile games and being well-positioned for sustained profitable growth."

Clearly the issues regarding this week's update reach well beyond the short term. The loss of more than half of the workforce at any company will have a dramatic effect on the business, and Storm8 will not be exempt from this.

Often when a company is forced into a position where it has to 'streamline' its business there isn't a noticeable effect externally to the customer, but in this case the lack of a weekly update tends to indicate otherwise.

Before we get into grave forecasts, it's worth considering that priorities at Storm8 are likely to have shifted drastically in the past week. For the sake of the long-term future of the company restructuring and reducing costs will be the priority, and hence producing content for their games is not as crucial as it has been historically, at least for now.

Storm8 company logo

Having said that, there was a regular update for the sister game, Bakery Story, on Wednesday, even if it was delivered slightly later than usual. Likewise a cruise event was introduced to Restaurant Story 2 within the last 24 hours and Dragon Story saw additions on Tuesday. This could of course be related to which games had content ready to be released prior to the news of the redundancies, but regardless it does give Restaurant Story players hope that production of new content for the Storm8 fleet won't be ceasing any time soon. On the flipside it could be interpreted as Restaurant Story being at the bottom of the food chain.

Perhaps it will take a few weeks for everything to settle down and for normal service to resume. There's really no telling from the outside if this optimistic view is accurate, and a lack of communication from the inside hasn't exactly helped the situation. The earlier quote from Storm8's CEO is all we've heard thus far, except for a throwaway comment from a community manager on the Storm8 Forum:

"We really appreciate the interest in Restaurant Story. We can't speculate on when, but please be on the lookout for new updates in this game. We apologize for any inconvenience."

I'm hesitant to complain about this post as CMs are not really privy to the inner workings of the game's developer, but at the end of the day an empty statement such as this does nothing to allay fears in the community regarding the future of this beloved game.

So what happens next? Well, we just have to be patient and hopefully ride it out. Given that the Storm8 CEO was recognised by Goldman Sachs only a few months back for his entrepreneurship and the company as a whole proudly reported its games had reached one billion downloads in 2016, it is perhaps surprising that we are discussing the future of Restaurant Story in such a negative light. But it does seem that the growing saturation of the mobile gaming market has had an impact on Storm8, which has been around since the rise of gaming apps.

For now, I and this blog are going nowhere. Clearly my weekly update posts will go on hold for now, but you can continue to expect my range of other posts at weekends to continue in the short-term. We've got to stick together people!