I held off on posting this until the day that it was supposed to happen in Korea. This news was actually announced back on August 14, 2017
http://www.inven.co.kr/webzine/news/?news=183791
Bluehole (what was then known as Bluehole Studios) had previously acquired Ginno Games (after Devilian was officially released) and became a subsidiary as part of the Bluehole Alliance and renamed Bluehole Ginno. The plan was to annul the Bluehole Ginno corporation and merge it into the parent company Bluehole Studio.
That process was supposed to be completed by September 6th (KST).
Bluehole announced on July 21 that they were withdrawing the proposed merger. One of the key reasons for that is due to the success of PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS (PUBG). While it is technically considered a game from Bluehole Ginno, that is primarily due to Brendan Greene’s title as Creative Director for Bluehole Ginno (when it comes to design). The bulk of the development work is handled by Bluehole’s internal development team (which also handles TERA and Devilian Mobile). Another reason related to this is the dilution of bonuses/rewards and incentives for the small team that developed the game (a merger would’ve diluted the rewards by splitting it across all development teams; the goal is to incentivize the various teams to come up with their own hits).
http://www.thebell.co.kr/front/free/contents/news/article_view.asp?key=201708240100041980002545
Maintaining a separate corporate structure will allow maximum business efficiency/operations (more or less specifically related to PUBG in order to maximize its profitability).
PUBG is also now considered the only game that is under the stewardship of Bluehole Ginno (Devilian as a whole is referred to in the past tense; that was only the case before with the PC MMO version where it no longer showed up as a line item in financial statements). Part of this explains the lack of updates for the mobile version (last major content update was patch 1.1.4 back in April 2017). Several guild features including GvG, guild dungeon, and guild rankings as well as the 3 other archdemon battle bosses, and the real-time raid haven’t been implemented. This doesn’t mean those won’t be eventually released (it’s just lower priority now as work continues to move PUBG from early access to release).
GoodGames (the Thai publisher for Devilian) has had the game server operating in maintenance mode since June 2016 (the game was also no longer listed on their list of online games around the same time) where it is often times left to run until it crashes (where it can then take a whole day before their operations team notices and restarts it). I still use GoodGames as an example of just how high and dry Bluehole Ginno left them once they released all of the available content (by November 2015).
Trion Worlds has been noticeably silent (normally, they have an announcement of the upcoming content update every 3 months) which dovetails with the silence of our source that has normally tipped Giko and myself off with impending news. This also doesn’t mean there won’t be anymore updates since there was the revamped Devilian form 3v3 and the entire unique gear tier system. It’s again more of a priority thing as well as Trion Worlds not doing their part and pressing Ginno for updates/fixes.
The fact they have not run this years summer event (popsicle drops) is also telling since Ginno needs to release a server and client patch to enable/disable it. I guess this was one of the deeper reasons why I decided to (just barely) resume playing; so that I can play my characters with what little time remains before the population (unique players and not alts) hits that terminal point.
