CipSoft's headquarters
CipSoft GmbH is the company that developed and produced the game Tibia.
Based in Regensburg, Germany, they began in 1995 as a group of university students who had the notion to write an online role playing game. The company was formally founded in June 2001 by Stephan Börzsönyi, Guido Lübke, Ulrich Schlott, and Stephan Vogler, when the students decided to run Tibia full-time after graduating from the university.
The founders act as executive officers of the company. They still maintain Tibia today (with the assistance of paid and volunteer staff), and regularly release content updates, game patches, and feature modifications.
Their most recent claim to fame was the release of the first on-line role-playing game for handheld devices, TibiaME.
Origin of the name
Official logo
Initially, the creators of Tibia named their team "CIP Productions." When the company was founded, the name was changed to CipSoft.
According to the Markus Hof (a.k.a. Judigator), in an interview to TibiaNews [1], the word CIP comes from the german acronym of "Computer Investitions Projekt". This is a project where universities invest in rooms with computers for their students, and the Tibia project was born in one of these rooms.
The CipSoft team
CipSoft's staff members
As at November 2006, the team consisted of 4 executive officers plus 23 full-time employees who work in 6 different departments:
- Programmers: development of the client, the server software, the website, and tools for the development and management of the games
- Content team: creation of game content (e.g. graphics, quests, game mechanics, story, NPCs' text, design of areas, etc.)
- System administrators: looking after the game servers in the computer centres and responsibility for the maintenance of the office's infrastructure
- Customer support: supporting the players via email, website boards and also in-game
- Marketing: identifying the wishes of the players for game features, managing the public relations of the company, advertising and distribution
- Organization: doing all the administrative tasks, and checking if everything is going fine
Products
CipSoft's official site says that its "vision is to develop and to publish innovative products that are based on new technologies", and that they "do not necessarily confine ourselves to computer games, but the focus of our expertise is clearly on the fields of IT, software development, Internet, entertainment, computer games and community management" [2].
Its first product was the game Tibia, which was one of the first graphical online role-playing games; it was initially developed as a hobby, and later it became a commercial game. The second product was Tibia Micro Edition (TibiaME), the very first MMORPG for mobile phones.
According to a TibiaNews interview of the executive officers ([3]), CipSoft is currently working on the development of a third game (that has nothing to do with Tibia), for which they hired a 3-d artist. Even though further details were not revealed until now, it was said that, if everything goes as planned, more information on the project will be released in the months to come.
Criticism
Much criticism has been drawn toward the company within the past few years due to the ways they run the game/treat their customers.
For instance, DDosing has been a constant issue for the game for much of 2007 and into 2008, with CIP concluding that "They are working on the issue" but for many other games such as World of Warcraft and many bigger companies this problem is usually fixed within a few days leaving questions from players and no answers from the company on why this continues to be a problem.
Another issue is the cavebotting or "botting" which allows players to hunt and cast spells without a player actually being at the keyboard. With this issue it has spiraled out of control and with no end in sight, many of the players are asking why nothing is being done, like previously stated (WoW) has a program called the Warden to detect and ban any players who use cheat programs.
Another issue, bundled with possible Ddosing is the consistent Lag and kicks from the game which occur most days on game servers and CipSoft again has been rather shady with their business ethics and morals in answering players and/or bringing these issues to a halt. This has led many long-time players to quit the game entirely.
Company's Data
The following table shows the evolution of the turnover and number of employees of CipSoft, since it was founded until the end of 2007:
| Year | Turnover (Euro) |
Number of Employees (end of year) |
|---|---|---|
| 2001 | 27,595 | 4 |
| 2002 | 151,049 | 4 |
| 2003 | 815,908 | 7 |
| 2004 | 2,763,784 | 16 |
| 2005 | 4,047,663 | 22 |
| 2006 | 4,778,761 | 27 |
| 2007 | 6,266,947 | 36 |