Rogue Reorganization- Atomic Mass Games

Startling news out of the X-wing world Monday with the announcement that Atomic Mass Games, another subsidiary of Asmodee, will be taking over development of all X-Wing products. More than that, they’ll also be doing Legion and Armada. A similar thing happened earlier this year with FFG’s RPG lines, most notably for d20 Radio Genesys and Star Wars. That went down with the announcement that FFG had fired all of their RPG staff and only a few months later was Edge Studios announced and several of the staff had been hired on.

There have been no confirmed reports with X-wing staff fired or transferred but the article does indicate at least some personnel will transfer over. We do know several of the people involved with FFG’s Organized Play left/were fired a few months ago. That might have been related or due to the pandemic killing organized play for this year.

What does this mean for X-Wing, Armada and Legion? That is the million dollar question. Possibly nothing aside from a label on the box. IF key personnel are transferring seamlessly and this proves to be nothing more than an inhouse restructuring then it could have no real impact on the game. I’ve not played it but have heard good things about Crisis Protocol, which Atomic Mass produces, so that suggests they can handle the switch. Legion has been pumping along steadily and is a similar style product to Crisis. And we know Armada has been plans going into the Clone Wars era.

However, this change could mean significant changes to X-wing. For one thing, AMG posted a brief Q&A yesterday. They didn’t really say much of anything that wasn’t already said in the announcement post aside from to acknowledge changes are coming. They make the point that their focus will always be on improving things. So, really, this doesn’t say much of anything.

For another, we haven’t had any announcements for the next wave. Several things were rushed out in September, October and next week for November.  We’ve heard nothing about the future. That could be due simply to waiting until after this announcement and, instead of FFG announcing the next wave, AMG will.

Or it could mean that due to the staff changes there are no fixed plans for the next wave. We unfortunately can only speculate. While Edge Studios with their retention of key staff suggest good carryover for the RPG lines, they have yet to release any new products. So we can’t look to that change for a complete picture comparison. The fact that the restructure was announced rather than coming months after firing everyone and then rehiring them hints this one will be more smooth.

Until the next wave is announced we won’t have any idea on what this will mean for X-wing. Who will design those ships? Will there be price changes (I hope not, ships already rose 33% with 2.0, if they go up even more they really start to become unaffordable)? Will there be a significant delay in releases so that we don’t hear or see anything new until late 2021 or even 2022?

For myself, I expect very little will change. But like R2, I have been known to make mistakes. From time to time.