Guardians of Ember switch to Gameforge is in progress (updated)

Update: The maintenance for the EU servers is over and the Gameforge servers are already live. The US servers are still going through the maintenance process.

Last month we noticed the deal where Gameforge acquired the publishing rights for Guardians of Ember from Insel Games. While there was a “later this year” kind of thing for the switch, there was no specific date at all.

Fast forward to today and we discovered that Guardians of Ember is already in maintenance mode. The servers are down today and the transfer should result in a downtime of around 36 hours. When the game relaunches, the premium shop won't be available anymore, as it will be reworked and available with the Gameforge relaunch. The info ends up being a bit contradictory, as statements such as “once the transfer of the data to the Gameforge servers is done and the game is back online” seem to conflict with “As soon as we have a relaunch date, we will inform you.”

There is one more thing that we still don't know: while Guardians of Ember was originally free-to-play in Asia, it was released as buy-to-play in Europe and North America by Insel Games. Gameforge is a publisher of free-to-play games, so does this mean that the game is going back to its F2P roots? Let's wait and see.