when importing animation our game engine expects the pivots to be in the centroid of the object but the Houdini Alembic writer places the pivot at the origin for the first frame and then calculates the xform relative to this. Can one control how this is done?

Im not sure exactly how to do this yet, but essentially you have to use the pivot attribute to re-center the geometry before baking….

I exported the pivots as points and made the adjustment after I imported the objects in Maya.

Was in contact with support about the issue and it can't be done atm. The packed prims workflow is still in its early days.