Bluehole previously referred to their subsidiary units under the umbrella known as the Bluehole Alliance. They created a new brand called the KRAFTON Game Union as a way to allow these subsidiaries to work/grow together while also maintaining their independence. The objective (similar to a prior initiative with Bluehole Ginno) again has a slant of increasing the companies “brand” competitiveness in the global market. The brand part is important because that is what all of this smoke and mirrors is about (trying to create a household name sort of like how you think of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nike, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, etc). This isn’t about creating games that are globally competitive except to ride on the coattails of PUBG for as long as they can.
Additionally, Bluehole intends to also change its name to better reflect all of these subsidiaries. Previously, Bluehole acquired other development studios, rebranded them with the Bluehole name, and then allowed those subsidiary units to operate fairly independently (in sort of a sink or swim style). Recent additions like Red Sahara Studios and Delusion Studio did not receive this same rebranding.
Unlike larger Korean studios like NCSoft and Nexon, Bluehole does not have a lot of franchises to rely on. TERA was its first (and that was actually based off of misappropriated intellectual property from the Lineage III project at NCSoft when a large number of personnel from that team, left NCSoft to form Bluehole Studios). While TERA enjoyed a degree of success initially (and managed to hold a position in the top 10 as far as worldwide revenues in the MMO space), it was not enough to even put Bluehole on the map.
What did put it on the map was PUBG (which came out from what was once a marginal subsidiary unit known as Bluehole Ginno; a company that Bluehole acquired for its MMO take on Diablo in what became a double failure franchise known as Devilian Online for PC’s and Devilian Mobile). After PUBG took the company by surprise with its success during Steam Early Access, the company leadership began falling over themselves with coming up with a corporate strategy to maximize the amount of money they could make from the game. They initially planned to merge the parent company with Bluehole Ginno but nixed that idea. They eventually renamed Bluehole Ginno to PUBG Corporation where it solely focuses on PUBG (its playerbase size and revenues has since far surpassed TERA).
The companies next title is Ascent: Infinite Realm (Project W) which they are working together with Kakao Games (due to their investment in Bluehole in exchange for the publishing rights). The initial closed beta in Korea (December 2017) did not get the most most glowing feedback; the result has been several delays for the next closed beta in Korea (now into 2019) with the global CBT pushed back even further.
The biggest issue I see with this newly branded alliance is it does nothing to solve their PC MMO development pipeline which is pretty much just TERA and A:IR (PUBG is not an MMO). TERA is based on a really old build of Unreal Engine 3 and is just horribly optimized (they’ve been trying to address some of this but it doesn’t go far enough). A:IR began its development around 2014 where the general design/development expertise was still with Unreal Engine 3 (plus it made it easier to utilize unused or modified assets from TERA). The company hasn’t been able to optimize/custom tweak the engine (and it is pretty much a non-trivial exercise in bringing the game up to more modern technology). The company doesn’t seem interested in investing too much into TERA at this juncture and I doubt A:IR will have anything but a niche following after the initial hype subsides.
Also, while there was a period of time where I did hold out some remote hopes that they would decide to do something with the Devilian IP, they’ve now removed it from the list of PC games in their list of offerings. Basically, there is a clear lack of interest to pursue the PC MMO market by the company (and the only reason why A:IR is still on the table is because of the investment from Kakao). The attention to detail in LOST ARK is probably well beyond what most other Korean studios are going to be willing to put in. It’s probably why Project TL is still in the works but not really being talked about by NCSoft. They can come up with high production on the facade but how much design effort will they put into the actual systems? The Lineage franchise is of core importance to NCSoft though (so much so that they announced a remaster of the original Lineage PC game).
Reading between the lines (looking at the subsidiaries they’ve acquired), the company seems to be rudderless where they are more or less hitching themselves to the mobile market and relying on PUBG as the game they will use to feed some of the revenues into these other units (hoping for the next unexpected success). Bluehole didn’t have much to really talk about at G-Star 2018 except PUBG and showing off a teaser for their new mobile MMORPG (with a hereditary system) simply known for now as Project BB (which is the furthest along in development out of the 5 titles they said they are working on).
