Interesting “development”… a semi-recent Twitter account belonging to GameOn, Co. Ltd, posted that an official TERA SEA server will be opening in the future. I learned about this after they posted comments on my YouTube channel, noting this announcement. And it is semi-old because the account was created in November 2021 (more on that later).
GameOn was the licensor of TERA Japan, and ran the game service through the Pmang portal (both GameOn and Pmang are subsidiaries of Neowiz Games; which itself is a subsidiary of NEOWIZ, the owners of the Bless franchise). Pmang has a huge presence in Japan as an online portal for PC and mobile games (and thus made sense from an economies of scale perspective considering that PC gaming is not as big as console and mobile in Japan). GameOn, Co Ltd itself is based in Shibuya, Japan.
GameOn seemed to have been in contract renegotiation talks before they concluded with their January 2022 announcement that TERA Japan would be closing. They had noted that after close discussions with Bluehole, that it would be difficult to provide a service that would satisfy their customers in the future. It should be noted that such discussions (especially ones related to publishing contracts), takes place over the course of several months. The November 2021 creation of this GameOn Twitter account, falls within that timeframe.
Back then, it is highly possible that GameOn representatives were getting this drift from their Krafton counterparts, that the Bluehole Studio subsidiary (that oversees Elyon and TERA) was severely curtailing work on TERA (but the studio had not yet made the decision to totally end development; a fact we all learned from the official announcement on April 20th). GameOn therefore may have created this Twitter account at that time, to prepare for an alternative announcement regarding TERA (running in a sort of maintenance mode similar to what a lot of companies do with services like VALOFE Global and their VFUN portal, which hosts dead end development games like Riders of Icarus, MU Legend, and Bless Unleashed).
The information on both their Twitter and Discord are vague as of this writing; a few folks have asked in the Discord if this is officially licensed (the administrators have not answered with a resounding yes). One moderator answered this will be global when someone asked if this was a private server. From what I could gather, it seems there is some sort of talks happening with GameOn representatives and Bluehole (and considering this Twitter announcement, seems likely to happen).
The question is why SEA (Southeast Asia)? The most likely reason is costs (licensing as well as data center expenses) and region related ones. Regions often times has specific regional publishers that have the exclusive rights to those regions (they paid big money to have those publishing rights). It is obviously touchy now because Gameforge has a large swath of regions for the game until June 30th. Those rights for TERA ends at the end of this month. The Thai/SEA region has always been lax when it comes to stuff like region blocking.
For whatever reason though (and part of it seems to be Bluehole not wanting to deal with the administrative end with the licensing agreements), Bluehole did not even bother approaching a company like VALOFE Global to takeover the publishing of TERA on an as-is maintenance mode agreement. Or maybe VALOFE did, but Bluehole refused, or maybe asked for too high a price (such deals need to make sense for publishers of maintenance mode titles). Gameforge obviously did not want to continue down that route as it was obvious revenues were becoming a problem (given all of the TERA Thaler bonus promotions they were running).
With this announcement by GameOn, we’re going to find out a bit more about what is going on (and whether or not Bluehole is actually willing to continue to license out the TERA IP as a maintenance mode game). I have “official” in quotes for a reason though since none of this is confirmed; there is the possibility that this isn’t on the up-and-up either (we will find out shortly). Without migration options though for regions that are still in operation (before they sunset at the end of this month), I cannot see how this would make financial sense for GameOn. Having the servers running out of Thailand (but not region locked to allow for a global audience) is going to already be problematic for a latency dependent game like TERA (it will be beneficial for players in the directly connected regions but that seriously degrades even to Japan, South Korea, and the ANZ/Oceania regions due to less than optimal peering agreements to Bangkok where the two largest data centers are located). Trying to play from North America or Europe would be painful without regional servers in place (and that again, makes little economic sense unless GameOn can piggy back off of existing contracts in those regions; from what I can gather, the company does not have a huge presence in NA or EU).
Alternatively, Bluehole may have growing concerns with the rapidfire developments that have taken place with the leaked v100.02 server binaries (and also believe that the rest of the builds that were available to HappyTuk until it’s November 2021 closure, were also likely snuck out from the QA testing group). One rogue server (Menma’s) has already proven to be a hit with their modified 92.03 version (and has plans already in place to eventually migrate to 100.02) by gobbling up a small portion of the Gameforge player base (that number is only going to grow post-sunset). And there are also more of us working the offline angle (leaked server binaries are completely fair game in that arena) where it is close to a turnkey (from a server setup point of view) solution.
Licensing TERA (as a maintenance mode game to GameOn) in this manner will allow them a continued official presence to make it easier to protect their intellectual property; it’s actually a mandatory legal requirement for trade/service mark protections. Additionally, Bluehole must realize that nature abhors a vacuum, and that rogue servers will take the place of any officials ones once everything PC officially sunsets at the end of this month; this being more so a fact with official server binaries in the wild.
I still believe Krafton/Bluehole has blockchain/NFT based plans to asset flip TERA there. What they forgot is that by killing the development of PC and the domino effect it had with all regions sunsetting on PC, is that they became public enemy #1 of that TERA player base (there are alternatives due to the leaked server binaries). There’s not much they can do with those leaked binaries though except takedown notices of repositories; but that’s like playing whack-a-mole/cutting off the heads of a multiheaded hydra that ends up spawning more heads. They could do damage to the rogue servers though (they’ve been very hands off to date). If this is what is going on and they DMCA the TERA Offline clips on my YouTube channel, I’ll have no issues with that so long as they have an officially licensed version of the game running on PC.
But goodwill and trust comes in many different forms; Krafton/Bluehole crapped on it with how they are handling the closure of the TERA IP on PC. Krafton as a company has never learned how to grow success across multiple franchises. TERA was initially the breadwinner for the company; now it is PUBG. Gameforge is collateral damage with how poorly they are handling the closing for their regions of TERA. Many of us have moved on; just not the normal way that is expected when a game closure is officially announced since for some of us, TERA Online simply became TERA Offline, free from both Bluehole and any publishers draconian monetization methods. For myself, this is the SECOND Krafton/Bluehole game that I’ve played which they are closing (the other one was Devilian).
So if this TERA SEA thing is actually official (and we get confirmation from Bluehole that TERA PC can continue to be licensed as a maintenance mode title), it might be a good thing for those who prefer playing on officially licensed servers (there are still a lot of TERA players who have zero idea of the alternatives at this time; and there are many who remain wary of playing on rogue/private servers and also do not have the hardware to even try the offline route with the server binaries). Myself, I welcome this news if it pans out because it looks a lot better to not be a completely officially dead game when so many maintenance mode titles that don’t even have 3-digit players left, are still operational with companies like Gamigo and VALOFE Global having a library full of graveyard MMO’s.
What Krafton/Bluehole needs to be careful about is how they deal with the rogue servers and those of us playing with the leaked server binaries offline. The company has every right to protect its intellectual property when it comes to the game being run as an unofficially licensed service to the general public. There is however a point where any action may end up stirring up such negative press, that it may not be worth the backlash. Those who are running it offline or very privately for a small group of family/friends becoming individual targets though, would really be pushing that line (because it was ultimately Bluehole’s responsibility to have the hole plugged with one of their publishers).
