And here is the boom. ArcheAge in general is living on borrowed time. XLGAMES which operates the Asia version of ArcheAge, announced they will be ending that service on December 1, 2023. Unsurprisingly, the rumors that were going around earlier weren’t that far off the mark. This aligns with the termination of ArcheAge Unchained for NA/EU (where it is being rolled into the legacy version of ArcheAge). However, this is only going to be a short term reprieve of the eventual inevitability since the population is already on thin ice even when combining the two versions.
Here is the kicker; if they go through with merging everything into a single server per region, that will have the side effect of driving players away (not what the game needs at this point since it will put pressure on the metrics that will determine how quickly the plug is pulled). Yes, this is all going to be academic within the next year and a half because it is becoming obviously clear that XLGAMES wants to wind down development of ArcheAge so that they can focus completely on ArcheAge 2. It makes sense when it comes to the production pipeline (modern tools and development with Unreal Engine 5 versus CryEngine 3).
