Now that Trion has officially sunset Devilian, there is something which I need to get off my chest regarding most every MMO site that has covered the closure from the time of the announcement.
Not one of them as far as I know, bothered to use their media credentials and contacts to directly interview Bluehole about the franchise. Most everything written regarding the reasons for the mutual decision by both Bluehole (Ginno) and Trion Worlds to bring the game to a close, has been attributed to what I wrote in my open letter (though none of these media sites directly attributed the details that I posted to me since after all, I’m just posting with an online pseudonym; I don’t care about that though).
And what I posted in that open letter is NOT even the full story as to why things transpired as they did since I intended to do that at some latter date. Of course, I don’t expect Bluehole to go into detail regarding the deteriorating business relationship aspects that Bluehole Ginno had to deal with once the Devilian team at Trion was downsized and the wrong person let go -> Andrew “Drewcifer” Sipotz and the wrong person left to continue overseeing its operation -> cough, cough Victoria “Firecait” Voss.
In this particular case with Devilian, these MMO news sites effectively just picked up the story from a few sources and then embellished it with their own writing (why I said they are like parrots). Most of the “Bluehole Ginno stopped working on the game” is based on what I wrote in my open letter. Yes, I’ve written numerous times before on this blog that they stopped work on the PC version when they shifted resources to complete Devilian Mobile for GAMEVIL (since GAMEVIL made a lucrative pitch to do this massive global marketing promotion for it). But none of these MMO news site bothered to go directly to the source to get the PR message directly from them (meaning Bluehole). These folks can’t even source me because I’m just a blogger using a pseudonym (but that doesn’t mean I don’t have sources or industry contacts either).
With Devilian Mobile, Bluehole Ginno at the time was a small team and had no vast experience with mobile; Ginno’s other co-founder and former CEO Won Hee-Park (who was replaced by fellow co-founder Chang-Han Kim once Bluehole Ginno was renamed to PUBG Corp) stated in interviews that he didn’t realize how much more work it required (Park thought mobile was easy since he was previously looking at everything from the point of view of having a fully developed PC MMO and thought adapting parts of it to mobile would be straightforward).
I personally don’t think he fully realized that you just cannot take designs made for a PC MMO, and try to shoehorn them onto a mobile device. If you want to create an open world style mobile MMO that works well on hand held devices, that part needs to be designed from a mobile perspective where its about touch and touch control systems (and scenes need to also be modified so that you can see stuff on a smaller screen). So basically, Bluehole Ginno had to design everything from scratch (and thus could not afford to allot resources to the PC version.
And this (again) is the part that bugs me which is what this “semi-rant” is about. Repeating what I said earlier; none of these MMO news sites (as far as I know) bothered to ask for an interview with PUBG Corp CEO Chang-Han Kim and ask him about what Bluehole has in store for the Devilian franchise that he previously worked on. None of these sites seemed to even bothered to have researched his credentials; I mean he was a co-founder of Ginno Games. He was CTO for the company and wore multiple hats including being project director for Bluehole Ginno (after Ginno Games was acquired by Bluehole) and then executive producer for Devilian. It’s something he has close ties to. Yet none of these so called MMO news media sites ever bothered to interview him about the franchise directly.
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| 3rd from the left (top row) is Victoria “Firecait” Voss, Rick “Din Othar” White, Chang-Han Kim, Andrew “Drewcifer” Sipotz with the rest of the Devilian team from Bluehole Ginno |
You could say that when Drewcifer was the associate producer for Devilian, he could talk gaming with the Bluehole Ginno folks. A lot of changes were made for Trion despite the fact that development for Devilian had actually stopped (in terms of newly designed content past what had existed in the Korean and Thai versions). These changes, streamlining, and quality of life improvements being done for Trion were eventually meant to roll back into those other two versions (and then after that, new designs and content considered at which point, development could then resume if conditions were appropriate).
Bluehole Ginno also spent considerable time giving most all of the graphics finetuning and refinement. The game client was also rewritten with a lot of more options. One game system that was not even part of the original Devilian design was class-form PVP (battlegrounds and arena). The game had none of the supporting sub-systems to handle that. But Bluehole Ginno worked on creating those designs and delivered a nearly 100% working design during Trion’s closed beta (and promised it would be ready by the time the game launched).
The company also had to burn considerable time and resources dealing with the server migration/merge for Trion (many of us players warned Trion about going with two initial servers per region from the start which they failed to heed, and then when we asked them to begin merging them as soon as possible, they would just ignore that feedback and did it for far too long where by the time they rolled out the “megaservers”, the total population in each region had dropped off considertably.
The above PVP example is one of several of the main core changes that Bluehole Ginno performed while Drewcifer was with Trion. And that continued until the Alvir’s Legacy update which shortly after, there was an executive decision made to downsize the Devilian team which moved Devilian’s senior producer Rick “Din Othar” White to another project (Atlas Reactor at the time which had not been announced) and led to the voluntarily resignation of Andrew “Drewcifer” Sipotz (since he was going to be a pink slip casualty). After that, it was all downhill because Firecait didn’t really play or understand the details of the game.
So Bluehole Ginno had sunk all of this time and effort at that point, only to have their business partner try to save money on their end, with no captain to steer the ships rudder in the correct direction. Firecait’s expertise is in backend IT systems; her knowledge of Devilian was cursory at best especially in the finer details. With that frame of reference, there is no way to “talk shop” with the folks at Ginno who were for the most part, gamers. And that lack of ability to converse and relate past the language and culture barriers, is why the rest of content rollout for Devilian happened the way it did. On top of Trion’s (as a company) tendency towards making money whichever way possible with quality being at bottom of the priority list, having the absolute wrong person (Voss) overseeing Devilian were the main contributors towards where we are today.
That slow roll of content and lack of community interaction by Trion caused even more players to leave resulting in dropping shared revenues. Now put yourself in the shoes as a business person (Ginno’s CEO and Devilian’s executive producer) where you see this negative trend with player concurrency numbers, player retention rates, and dropping revenues from your business partner who is handling the publishing. Do you just sit back in your seat, twiddle your thumbs, and think everything is going to be alright (while considering how much man hours and thus budgeting was spent to deliver what you did prior to the Alvir’s Legacy patch)?
Can anyone blame them for starting to look at other avenues of revnue like the battle royale game pitch? I’m not saying Bluehole Ginno is blameless here because I have mentioned before they could have also handled things a little better. But Trion World’s higher level decisions with what they did to the Devilian team (plus not dealing with a lot of issues before that downsizing), is a huge factor and contributor to what led to the eventual closing of the game. Din Othar would have been a far better person to remain in charge of Devilian BUT would’ve still had to deal with the lack of support on the community facing end. There is obviously more to this story but most of that is going to end up on my Devilian-Info site in the future.
I am pretty tired though of many putting far too much blame on Bluehole for not doing enough because they did give their subsidiary Bluehole Ginno a long leash and provided them a lot of support (budgeting, software engineers, grapical artists, technical resources, and access to TERA’s vast intellectual property) to be able to overhaul and change Devilian from what it was when Ginno Games was acquired.
Here… the following is an image of what the dualist (berserker) originally looked like before the proposed Bluehole acquisition and before all of their resources that were poured into the game to overhaul the graphics, the client, game systems, and gameplay. I would not have played this version because it looked terrible; the whole game looked like this before it was given the Bluehole treatment.
That is why I want to set that record straight… that any anger should be mostly directed at Trion and not Bluehole when it comes to the root cause reasons for the demise of Devilian. That will become apparent once I complete the “early development” section on Devilian-Info (which will show how ugly the game was in the early days). I’m not saying Bluehole is perfect either (because they let TERA languish or haven’t bothered putting resources in to optimizing it). But they did do a lot for Devilian early on, and didn’t see the return on investment they had hoped for especially with a business partner like Trion in the mix.
So there was a point where the numbers just weren’t heading in the right direction and they had no choice but to prioritize the resources in the right places. They are running a business, not a charity.
