10/03/09 : The Kraken Communicates

The information is now official and many forums have already been talking about Asmodee having stopped the edition of Helldorado. After having received many mails, Josselin and the team wish to communicate you the following message:
"As I receive many messages of following the announcement of the end of Helldorado, I want to make a quick image of the current situation. I hope to be as clear as possible and I think you will find a set of answers that should satisfy your many interrogations. First of all, I want to clarify an essential fact: Kraken Editions is not Asmodee. It may seem silly to say but it is necessary to underline that. It is important for the various points that I develop below.

- Alkemy will not stop anytime soon!
Asmodee has chosen to refocus its business on its core activity: board games. The core business of Kraken Editions is miniatures.
Even if our desires outreach the pure tabletop game, our core activity is making miniatures. As a matter of fact, If one day we should announce the end of Alkemy, it would mean at the same time the end of Kraken Editions. And this will not happen anytime soon ;)

- Regarding the release plan:
The team is well aware that our current release policy is a barrier to some of you. The reason for this policy is simple: Alkemy now is just one year old, and Kraken is not much older. Alkemy is our first game and monopolizes all our financial resources. But they are not scalable. We do not have the economical assets of a Hasbro or a Games Workshop.
As a consequence we must wait for the previous waves to generate enough profit to be able to finance the next wave. We also made the choice (which proved to be sound) to develop internationally, and this requires further investments..
This leads to a situation where we need to space out our investments in order to sustain our business. In short, this is not a sign that the game or the company goes wrong, it is a sign that we do things at the pace we need to do to ensure that our business remains healthy (we could go faster by opening multiple bank credits, but it would be the road to oblivion).

- As for our mistakes:
What can we say? Nobody is perfect and certainly not we: sometimes, in our eagerness to offer you more and more, we tend to finish some projects too quick. Those are things we are aware of, and we strive for continuous improvement. This is why your feedback is so important to us: It allows us to perfect things that we did not necessarily consider perfectible. So please keep on coming back to us when you have any remark.

I wanted to be as clear as possible with you, to Share a little bit of what our activity within Kraken is made of. I hope it will answer your questions. If not, you know where to contact us ;)"

In addition, the entire Kraken team wishes the former Hellodrado Nantes team, which has also participated in developing the Alkemy and Artefactory miniature ranges, to succesfully sail towards new creative horizons.

In the various forums I visit, I have seen Alkmey come up in the discussions on Asmodee's HellDorado decision. Maybe Kraken just wanted to stave off any percieved e-worry?