In what is clearly surprising news, Smilegate announced that Mail.ru aka My.com will be the publisher for LOST ARK in Russia. The news is currently specific to the Russian service (and hopefully won’t extend to the English versions). Even Russian players currently playing on the Korean servers are not happy with this news.
My.com is the English language portal which has the NA/EU publishing rights to titles like Skyforge and Revelation Online. This publisher is known for questionable cash shop implementations (i.e. pay2win). When Revelation Online was still in closed beta, I quickly soured on how My.com handled access to it since there was always this ulterior motive of pushing Founders packs for what was at that time, a highly anticipated MMORPG. What cemented my opinion as this being a blatant cash grab was their Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotion of a special mount that had a steep discount for founder pack owners.
Unfortunately, there aren’t many options when it comes to publishers that are set up to do business in Russia which is unfortunately why Smilegate signed this publishing contract. As noted in the MMOCulture posting, there is no schedule announced yet given the work that still needs to be performed when it comes to localization.
There was of course anticipation regarding Smilegate’s plans once the Korean service moves from its current open beta test status to official release where there were no expectations that they would announce any schedule regarding NA/EU or whether they would focus on the Chinese service first until that had been completed. This move now at least signifies the company is in talks with publishers in regions outside of Asia. So it will be interesting to learn what their plans are for NA/EU (established publisher or will they self-publish).
