There was a time when Trion Worlds held the title (for me) of worst western game publisher (only to be replaced by Gamigo which absorbed its assets and some of its personnel), and then Kakao Games Europe. Gameforge continues to find ways to excavate themselves below all of the above. Gameforge has ALWAYS been PURE GARBAGE. During the time in 2018 when En Masse Entertainment had all of this drama surrounding them with TERA (proxy, DMCA, bannings, XIGNCODE), and parts of the player base moved over to Gameforge (and magically began praising them as being better), that “better” was only because EME became that much worse (and not because Gameforge dramatically improving; they had better community management at that time until Swords of Legends Online [SOLO] which they shifted most of their resources to).
While they did warn all of this would eventually be removed, it took them only a week to make it all go poof (Twitter, Facebook, forum, web site, YouTube). Thus even their recently posted Last Quest cinematics for TERA, disappeared as well (I have them backed up on my channel; it’s just disgusting how much Gameforge doesn’t give a damn about anything).
En Masse slowly turned off most of their presence but left their YouTube channel. The Trion Worlds YouTube channel didn’t disappear immediately after Gamigo took over (they slowly removed it even though they maintain the branding for the remainder of the Glyph platform games that were part of Trion’s portfolio; the Trove channel however still has livestreams from the Trion days).
After taking on SOLO, Gameforge’s community management for TERA really nosedived. Backing up a bit, when they took over EME’s NA region in November 2020, it wasn’t any sort of improvement from my point of view since by that time, they internally seemed to have already wound down on TERA (as they were probably in negotiation talks at that time with SOLO’s developers to publish the game in the west). Most my TERA Thalers balance was converted from my EME EMP (since Bluehole had paid Gameforge to honor our virtual currency balance), so thankfully, I didn’t spend a lot of money with this TRASH company.
Now contrast this with the Japanese publisher of TERA, Pmang. First of all, it should be noted that parent Neowiz’ (which owns the Bless IP and isn’t great regardless of region serviced) owns the Japanese subsidiary GameOn Co Ltd and it’s Pmang portal subsidiary. Pmang maintained their JTERA social media presence and web site even after their shutdown in April (they all have the appropriate notices in place stating that their capacity as official publisher ended on April 20, 2022 @8:30AM).
Then on June 30th, they tweeted out about their Japanese translation of The Last Quest cinematic which is posted on their JTERA website
守護者の皆様、こんにちは！
韓国で実装された「Last Quest(日本語字幕)」動画を公開しました。
共に歩んだ戦友たちとの最終章をぜひご覧ください！シャネーラ「もう…行くのね？」
▼動画はこちらからご覧ください。https://t.co/vUXRoEAHwE #TERA_JP pic.twitter.com/qXLRveG46l
— TERA公式【サービス終了】 (@teraonline_jp) July 1, 2022
https://twitter.com/teraonline_jp/status/1542799074344128513
Their site is still region locked to Japan but here’s a screenshot of their final tribute as the game closed on PC in the remaining regions.
And this is the Japanese sub of The Last Quest:
They obviously didn’t have to do any of this, but did it for the players who supported them (as publisher) and TERA JP. This is how you maintain some goodwill and loyalty. Yes, eventually even Pmang will remove all of this (the difference is they aren’t in a rush). Most publishers (especially the ones who service western regions) have absolutely no clue on how to do that because all their executive leadership cares about is extracting as much money out of our wallets with minimal effort for everything else.
