In the not so surprising news department, Round 8 Studio (the developer that took over publishing along with a blockchain partner after Barunson E&A handed those keys back over) has announced they will be terminating the service of Astellia on October 29, 2021.
I noted my skepticism about the longevity of the game back in December 2019 when NEXON announced they would be ending the Korean service. It didn’t help when they opened a free to play version called Astellia Royal (that from reading the Steam discussion forum, turned out to be a “hot mess”). The game did last longer than I expected even though it seemed it had been running mostly on auto-pilot for most of 2020.
Buy-to-play with the majority of Korean developed MMORPG’s is already a challenge (because most times, the leadership only views these non-Korean regions as additional revenue from already produced content as opposed to throughly understanding and designing them for a western audience). Black Desert Online has been one of the exceptions because it garnered a huge following early on (thanks to its then outstanding character creation). ArcheAge Unchained continues to chug along, but Gamigo is clearly trying to milk what they can from the same group of hardcores that spent thousands in F2P ArcheAge (during the Trion years).
By comparison, Astellia Online itself was fairly generic (the Astel system is what gave it some uniqueness, but not enough to overcome what I felt was extremely lackluster game play). It had potential though because Barunson E&A were very committed to try to make changes to the game for its western market. The problem however is that it would be a work-in-progress versus a game with content and systems already tuned for the global market. The Korean version was already lacking content (a deathknell when trying to gate content for the western market). Thus another Korean MMORPG ends up in the dustbin of never ending cash grabs and then the inevitable closure. Condolences to those players who really did enjoy what it had to offer.
