Previously, it was noted that Bluehole had created a new subsidiary called PUBG Corporation to oversee PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS (PUBG). Some western sites also mentioned that Bluehole Ginno as being expanded into a “full blown subsidiary” named PUBG Corp but there were no actual sources to confirm what was actually taking place.
After digging through Korean news wire services to have some referable online source (Bluehole is privately held which makes it much more difficult to find relevant company news that I can directly source in posts like this; something that I can’t do with our Korean non-press source), I can now confirm that the subsidiary Bluehole Ginno was renamed to PUBG Corporation and a new CEO appointed to oversee this unit. It is not known as of this writing what happened to Ginno’s former CEO Park Won Hee. The new CEO (Chang Han Kim) worked on Devilian as its producer from 2009 until the present.
Former CEO Park Won Hee was last interviewed last year before Devilian Mobile launched in the west where he briefly covered the failure of the PC version of Devilian, and how he parlayed its most unique feature (half human/half devil transformation system) into something licensable (Devilian IP). No one licensed that intellectual property though which put into question the long term viability of this franchise.
Yonhap News Agency was one of the few to note in their report that “Bluehole Ginno projects” would remain with Bluehole. What those projects cover is vague because Devilian Mobile’s service is being terminated by GAMEVIL (announced on August 31st) and development work on PC Devilian had ended by early 2016. It could simply be administrative in terms of their publishing contracts with True Digital Plus (GoodGames Thailand) and Trion Worlds since the latter still generates small amounts of revenue from Patron and marketplace sales (revenue sharing agreement).
I hate to say it but the service termination for Devilian Mobile is not a positive development and when people mutter “dead game”, this is getting very close to that threshold of this game turning into “Deadvilian” in the actual offline sense. I will be putting in an inquiry with the appropriate people at Trion Worlds to see if they can address the small remaining community.
In the meantime, players who still play and enjoy the game should try to enjoy it since no one knows at this time what the future may hold for this game.
