Neowiz announced the service termination of the Bless Korean servers today along with the schedule of the shutdown of specific services such as the cash shop, test servers, refunding of unused Lumena and premium subscriptions.
In light of this announcement, a producers letter was posted to Steam (for the global version) in an attempt to reassure players that the closure of the Korean server will have no impact on the official launch of Bless Online in NA/EU (which is currently in early access).
The closure of the Korean servers comes on the heels of the announcement of Bless Unleashed for the Xbox One while also reinforcing what I had felt strongly about early on about this being a final cash grab once they announced their pricing for Steam. Earlier than that, I mentioned back in February that this would end up just like Devilian (primarily because this game has been plagued with some of the worst underlying technical issues of any major Korean MMORPG ever).
Despite what the executive producer says, the writing is on the wall with the future longevity of the Steam version of the game. With the game service being shuttered completely in Korea, this gives the development team zero incentive to focus on designing actual new content. The early access population has gone from a peak of 34K concurrent players in May to sub-1000 (24 hour peak) this month across two regional servers.
To Neowiz’ credit, they at least are being transparent about the closure by putting out this producers letter. This is in direct contrast to PLAYWITH Interactive where they have not even made any type of public announcement regarding their closure of the Korean service of Kuntara Online (aka Warlords Awakening) to their Steam early access community and are doing a way worse job of interacting with that community period.
Neither of these companies are doing anything to increase the reputation of these Korean game studios though (if anything, it’s finally having the effect of making MMO players longing for something new, about the potentials for them as being a cash grab).
