Hey Jammers! After a long and busy summer, I'm back with a post. Seriously, it was probably the busiest summer in my life so far. In a good way, though! I got to do a lot of meaningful work outside.
Before I continue on to the big focus of this post, I thought I'd share this:
Something I spent a lot of time doing this summer is taking up-close photos of insects outside. There's so much of an insect's world that we can't clearly see from far away, and I think these kinds of photos of bugs in their habitat can help :)
For example... looking at this red milkweed beetle from above, you'd have no idea that they have a :3 face. But up close...
...you can kinda see it, right?
Fun fact: this beetle was very annoyed that I was following them around with my camera and was only on the blade of grass for like 5 seconds before flying away.
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And now, the main topic of this post:
WildWorks was sold.
Well, not really. It's been clear from the updates (or lack thereof) in both Animal Jam Classic and AJPW that WildWorks hasn't really had the resources to add as many new things as it used to. If there aren't actual new items in WildWorks' flagship game, it might be because they haven't been able to pay people to create them.
For a while I felt like WildWorks was just reducing AJ Classic updates because they wanted to replace AJC with AJPW, but honestly, now I'm starting to think that a big part of it was that they just ran out of resources to equally tend to both games.
And the more I think about it... the reason might have been Feral.
So much money and attention got redirected into that game, and ultimately that money didn't come back to WildWorks like they expected. I mentioned this a bit in my Cinder/Feral post a few months back.
And on that note– before I go through the rest of Clark Stacey's explanation of the sale, here's something you might be interested to know first:
The above paragraph is taken right from Clark Stacey's Instagram post. In response to the overwhelming backlash against WildWorks using Cinder to venture into cryptocurrency, WildWorks has disconnected itself from Cinder. From what I can see, this is good news!
And even better...
While the things a CEO of a company says about it are going to be sugar-coated, so far I don't see any backstabbing of the player-base here. It really seems like this deal was made so AJ (and WildWorks) could have the resources to keep on going.
Though I understand the nervousness from a lot of players convinced that this heralds "the end" of Animal Jam. When a company is bought, a whole lot of different things can happen. Sometimes workers get replaced, but what often happens is that the same people will be working, just under different leadership.
I tried to research these kinds of things and I'm honestly still confused about a lot, but here's a fact that I have read on multiple articles about the sale:
– WildWorks founders Clark Stacey and Jeff Amis will continue to be CEO and COO as they have been.
That's all I know. It's possible that the game will change a lot, but as I look at what's been written and try to stay positive, I think it won't be so bad.
Now if D¡sney bought WildWorks... then I'd be afraid.
Here's the full message from Stacey's Instagram page:
A big thank you to an anonymous commenter for letting me know about this! I'm glad I had the time to write up a post in the same day.
And before I go, I learned about something I hadn't thought of before: there's a possibility that AJC hasn't been updated as much because of technical issues from Flash...?
I don't really follow Jambassadors so I don't know which interview this could be, but it seems plausible.
Well, this has been a post.
I hope you all have as good a day as you can!
*using my ghost signature because I still want to be on hiatus :P
