Board Thread:LOC General Discussion/@comment-108.35.154.66-20130911165857/@comment-5428123-20140324071812

Chaos Drive is probably their attempt at diversifying because right now, they are in a precarious position. Like you said, they lost two of their major North American properties, and are in danger of losing grip on their North American markets. LOC right now is the only thing keeping their North American operations alive, so creating another game would help put them in a better position to succeed here. I suspect they're using Chaos Drive as a guinea pig to test new features and programming in the hopes of maybe abandoning LOC and moving all its user base to a more stable and streamlined game. Of course, that's just my crackpot theory. More likely, this is probably a move to simply expand and diversify.

However you look at it, it's pretty clear LOC is their biggest source of income in this region of the world, and the only reason why Applibot can still operate here. While its pretty clear that this game is taxing their time and resources a bit due to all the errors and network issues, this is because they simply have no choice but to invest in this game if they hope to succeed here. LOC is really that important to them. I wouldn't be surprised if they were finally making some progress after all this time considering the time they've already invested.

In my opinion, the issue with Applibot isn't laziness or a poor work ethic, but a lack of proper coordination and direction. It doesn't seem like the company itself is properly organized at all (at least their North American branch). When you look at their company website, you can tell that they aren't set up as well as other companies like Cygames. Their recruitment page says only that they are looking for illustrators. Really now? Considering all the bugs and issues with their games, you'd think they'd put an emphasis on hiring more programmers and support staff. Of course, maybe they simply prefer to hire based on contacts or something, but when I look at Cygames' website and their recruit page, the disparity really becomes apparent. Compare this page with this page. Cygames has a whole list detailing jobs like planners, illustrators, engineers, and such while Applibot only seems interested in illustrators. This tells me that something is wrong with their corporate structure.

Before I ramble on any further, I'll simply end with a closing note by saying that Applibot needs to fix their company, from the top to the bottom. Once they do that, they need to shell out some big bucks and time now to properly deal with the issues that plague LOC (servers, etc.) Only then will LOC actually begin gaining some meaningful ground here, because their constant issues continue to hamper growth in a major way.