OMAC Industries.

This page covers several legal entities that owned and managed Utopia with the same developers supporting the game during this time, the details of the separate company names or legal entities during this time have not been separated into different pages.
== Aliases / Company Names ==
JOLT
Scale Front Limited 
== Bio ==
=== OMAC ===
OMAC industries was founded in 2008 by Dylan Collins (who Brian and Sean had met at university), with headquarters in Dublin and operations in Los Angeles and Delhihttps://www.gamesindustry.biz/swirve-com-acquisition-publisher-of-browser-based-titles-utopia-and-earth-2025-picked-up-by-dublin-based-omac-industries on 07/04/24. Dylan and Sean had previosly worked together on Demonware. which was sold to Activision in 2006. OMAC bought Swirve.com including Utopia from Mehul Patel in July 2008 (Age 39). Mehul was convinced by OMAC's interest and commitment of resources to take the game to the next level, adding “their entire focus is on Persistent Browser Games and they’re the perfect partner to grow Utopia and Earth 2025". OMAC later shut down Earth 2025, the other game purchase from Mehul Patel. 
OMAC continued to purchase other popular broswer based games including Trukz.com, a popular trucking simulation gamehttps://www.gamesindustry.biz/trukz-com-trucking-sim-joins-omac-industries-persistent-browser-game-line-up on 07/04/24, later in July 2008. 
=== Jolt ===
Jolt was founded in 1999 and worked on browser games including Planetarion and Londinivm. Jolt was purchased by OMAC industries Jolt in June 2008https://www.gamesindustry.biz/omac-industries-acquires-jolt-online-gaming on 07/04/24 and ran by Dylan Collins. While both Jolt and Swirve had been purchased by OMAC in mid 2008, the company was branded to use the Jolt banner and OMAC was no longer referred tohttps://blog.utopia-game.com/post/10806710629/the-uf-news-interview-with-sean-brian on 07/04/24. Jolt was regarded as one of the pioneering social games publishers in Europe, and GameStop acquired a majority stake in the company in November 2009https://www.vg247.com/gamestop-acquires-majority-stake-in-jolt-online-gaming on 07/04/24. 
Roisin was in charge of development on Utopia, until Brian and Sean started work on Utopia for Jolt in February 2009https://blog.utopia-game.com/post/10812402608/development-update-and-qa-13-may-2009 on 07/04/24. Roisin moved onto other projects in April 2009https://blog.utopia-game.com/post/10811072370/brian-and-sean-interview-at-utimesorg on 07/04/24. 
In September 2009, following repeated denial-of-service attackshttps://blog.utopia-game.com/post/10811477261/development-update-7-oct-2009 on 06/04/24 , Jolt sold the IP to the Dublin-based Front Square Solutions (Sean Blanchfield and Brian McDonnell). Brian and Sean had planned to rewrite the game and more gradually transition from the Joly servers, however the DDOS attacks caused Jolt to shut down the old game servers earlier than expected.
Sean continued to work as consulting CTO for Jolt Online in 2010, after its acquisition by GameStop. They rapidly built a dev team, "helped launch a few new social games, and built an interesting gamified internal sales campaign platform that was used by about 30 thousand staff."https://seanblanchfield.com/about/ on 07/04/24 
In March 2012 Jolt announced the closure of the companyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolt_Online_Gaming#cite_note-joltonline7421-3 on 07/04/24. For further informaiton see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolt_Online_Gaming. 
=== Front Square ===
Brian and Sean met at Trinity College Dublin and both worked for OMAC/Jolt. They created a new company using thier own funds, keeping it small, doing their utmost to avoid venture capital and financing the company through part-time consultancy work, such as technology training.https://seanblanchfield.com/2008/11/exciting-new-company on 07/04/24 Brian and Sean said that before they took over, Utopia was in danger of being shut down by Jolt, as they viewed the difficulty and cost of running the game as exceeding its potential profitability.https://blog.utopia-game.com/post/10813067785/a-message-from-the-utopia-developers-18-mar-2010 on 06/04/24 They discussed the possibility of buying the game and completed the deal in September 2009. 
After Brian and Sean completed the deal to take control of Utopia and rewrote its code base from scratch, Front Square relaunched the game at utopia-game.com by the end of the year. They said that rewriting the game, while attempting to perfectly emulate the original game logic, took much longer than expected.https://blog.utopia-game.com/post/157213866578/long-live-the-new-lords-of-utopia on 06/04/24 The rewrtie was already planned before the DDOS attacks, but they caused a change in plans as the old servers had to be retired and Age 43 started on the new code (once written). Utopia was not available until the code rewrite was completed and the game restarted with World of Legends and no Genensis serverhttps://blog.utopia-game.com/post/10811517510/development-update on 06/04/24. 
At this time Game support was made up of the developers, Thundergore and Bishop. Brian was mainly in change of making game balancing changes for each new age, while Sean usually did the actual age restart codinghttps://blog.utopia-game.com/post/10806710629/the-uf-news-interview-with-sean-brian on 07/04/24. 
Following the launch their immediate focus was on game performance and stability, before they could start work on new features, player retention and growthhttps://blog.utopia-game.com/post/10806710629/the-uf-news-interview-with-sean-brian on 07/04/24. They asked the playerbased for feedback ahead of developing some new features. 
Brian and Sean were open about the game covering costs and generating income to fund proper coding, given that their development time was limited.https://blog.utopia-game.com/post/10813108651/the-coming-months-16-sept-2010 on 06/04/24 Brian and Sean thought that the growth of Utopia would require promoting the game in new languages and simplifying the game to make it accessible to new players. They said that wide spread scripted cheating was killing game performance, and could not afford to upgrade servers. they also said that they knew that one of the most prolific cheaters was also one of the most publicly vociferous anti-cheating complainants at the time. Looking back Sean said that the code reqrite in 2009 was "one of the most trying years of my lifehttps://blog.utopia-game.com/post/10806710629/the-uf-news-interview-with-sean-brian on 07/04/24". 
In the seven years that followed their purchase, Brian said they spent "countless weeks and weekends working to fix issues, tackle cheating, speed up the server and build new features... despite having full time jobs in a completely different company." The game had downtime for around a week in January 2012 as Front Square had issues with and changed their DNS provider.https://blog.utopia-game.com/post/16168281263/downtime-the-explanation on 06/04/24 They intorduced anti-cheating measures in 
and premium features. 
They were supported by staff members and volunteers including Bishop, Neil, Róisín, Thundergore, Simon, Vlad, Rob, Eman, Palem, 
=== Sale of Utopia ===
In February 2017, Blanchfield and McDonnell announced the sale of the game to the Massachusetts-based MUGA Gaming, LLC, headed by David Cannata and Jeff Terkowitz. The sale was aresult of 10 month's of dscussions. Brian and Sean thought that the game deserved more and while they had many expressions of interest in taking over Utopia, they said only MUGA showed the passion and acumen required to be successful. 
The game was immediately transferred to MUGA servers, with minimal visible change for players. 
Mehul shared his view that during this time, with all the sales and mergers involving Jolt and Gamestop, he thought the focus on the game was lost. 
== Associated Kingdoms and Alliances ==
== Controversies ==
=== Utopia Kingdoms ===
OMAC developed a spin off game called Utopia Kingdoms' that was described as 'basically a clone of Travian'. 
Utopia's original creator Mehul Patel descsribed it as 'pretty much a failed venturehttp://forums.utopia-game.com/showthread.php?618730-UF-News-An-interview-with-Mehul-Patel-creator-of-Utopia retrieved on 02/04/24' and that running Utopia "properly was more complicated than they realized". They didn't understand how to properly manage or monetize the games, and I think they gave up pretty quickly". Brian and Sean said they had no involvement in Utopia Kingdomshttps://blog.utopia-game.com/post/10812364906/development-update-and-qa-20-may-2009 on 07/04/24.