Back on February 5th, I wrote about Gameforge being on this 70% “bonus” TERA Thalers (TT) which is normally a sign of a publisher “fishing” for whatever revenue they can make to meet their contractual obligations (metrics they need to meet based on their revenue sharing agreement with the developer).
Since then, they have been running at this level including an 80% bonus on February 26th:
Happy Hour: nab 80% free TERA Thalers now!
We’re giving your wallets a treat: from 26/02/2022 at 21:00 (15:00 EST) until 28/02/2022 at 09:00 CET (03:00 EST), we’re giving you 80% more TERA Thalers with every purchase!#teragameforge #tera #gameforge #gaming pic.twitter.com/uqPmgxK0W5
— TERA (@TERAonline) February 26, 2022
March 5th and March 19th continued with the 70% bonus. I haven’t logged in since my TERA Club expired (a portion of this was the honored Elite status which was En Masse Entertainment’s version of TERA Club while another year was tacked on when I bought the discounted bundle Gameforge offered); this makes me part of retention (lack of) metric.
I still have around 2700 TT’s remaining (these were the honored EMP that transferred over; Bluehole payed Gameforge to have these credits transferred and recalculated as Thalers as a goodwill gesture for TERA PC players since they were doing the same for console, which they self-publish). Unfortunately, that’s going to be wasted since I don’t foresee TERA having a long term future (Krafton and Bluehole now have PUBG as the cash cow, and will likely find a way to leverage the TERA IP in their blockchain NFT plans instead of actually addressing the existing game).
Gameforge hasn’t even paid attention to the outdated TERA Club rewards that players have been complaining about since patch 114 dropped in February (my TC ended a few days after that update went live but I remembered the reward box still giving now outdated Mahtnan gear material). Basically, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out player retention cratering with the neglect by both publisher and developer where these continual TT promos sends a signal that the game is literally living on borrowed time (especially when one of its more profitable regions is closing next month).
While it won’t surprise me to eventually see such a headline, it will still feel like a gut punch. The saving grace will be the leaked server files from an earlier version of the Taiwan build of TERA (which I learned about an year after the fact when I found out the Taiwan region had been closed in November 2021), where I’ll at least be able to recreate my characters and still experience the combat in a locally hosted fashion).
