I personally thought it would be difficult for a western publisher to be far more incompetent than Gamigo was when it came to handling the ArcheAge IP in the west. Boy was I wrong; I introduce Kakao Games Europe (the western publishing subsidiary of South Korea based Kakao and Kakao Games). Parent Kakao Games (SK) acquired a 53% majority stake in XLGAMES 2 years ago. But as I noted before, just that investment does not translate into increased competence for either party. The development expertise for the ArcheAge franchise is still the domain of XL (along with their lousy coding); Kakao Games interest in the studio is primarily for mobile gaming development (so part of that investment was driven by XL’s impending release of Moonlight Sculptor as well as future mobile and PC developments for the ArcheAge IP; of which blockchain based ArcheWorld will be).
Kakao Games Europe is an already small publishing subsidiary of Kakao Games South Korea (which itself is just one division out of many of South Korea social media giant Kakao). I was already turned off by Kakao Games Europe (which was then known as Daum Europe before it rebranded itself) when they became the western publisher for Black Desert Online. It’s still mindboggling they held Black Desert for as long as they did (until developer Pearl Abyss took back the game in order to self-publish it).
Kakao Games (SK) investment in Bluehole for Project W was meant to get them the exclusive publishing rights for that game in South Korea and NA/EU; what ended up becoming Ascent: Infinite Realm which eventually rebranded itself in 2020 into the below average wreck known as ELYON. Kakao Games Europe handling of its release was unimpressively bad (switching the business model right before launch to free to play), and seems to have remained that way until the present (I don’t know since I only played the release for a short bit and stopped because I already knew from the CBT’s that it was not to my liking).
Kakao Games self-publishing of ArcheAge in the west was also not a surprise (given the majority stake in XL by the parent company). While I wasn’t under any illusion that things would get miraculously better, I was at least hoping they would handle the game a bit more competently than Gamigo did But it has been everything but that since taking over in early December. The last time I had anything to say about their incompetence was in late December. Little has improved since, and they managed to top themselves this past week by temporarily closing the in-game marketplace in order to take care of an exploit happening with the compensation for the long running missing item issues.
Exploits, ArcheAge, and XL all go hand-in-hand especially when coupled with publisher facing incompetence that adds more holes on top of the developer ones. For ArcheAge Unchained (AAU), the first of the free subscription period is ending in around a week (90 days). Kakao Games Europe in conjunction with XL, have done a horrible job at handing the changes made in AAU where more folks are deciding they aren’t going to resub (I would not be surprised if they are seeing higher revenues from legacy AA where the long timers are used to Patron, APEX, credit purchases). But the real meat will come in the next 90 days when the remaining free period ends. This is all on top of the ban waves they have been doing (taking out exploiters and RMTer’s). I have nothing against these ban waves (I believe they’ve been long overdue as Gamigo did little in this area); the point is most of these accounts were mostly 30 day trial ones with the rest being transferred accounts still under their free period in AAU. And given the poor handling to date, only the most hardcore will bother creating a new account and subbing.
The equivalent version that was released in Korea (AFTER Unchained was released first in the west by Gamigo), didn’t last long (it was eventually merged into the original game which is pretty much the way the game was designed to be played. Because of this, I don’t see XL placing any real priority into AAU (it’s going to be the usual lip service) where given the way it is currently being handled, will end up with poor enough numbers where XL and Kakao Games (KR) leadership will force merging the two versions (or just kill off AAU with no merge or transfer options). This will become more readily apparent as AA2 gets closer to an actual alpha test level. Basically, I doubt the AAU version will be around two years from now.
One thing I do know is that Kakao Games Europe (like Gamigo), is another western publisher to stay away from (all three European publishers including Gameforge, are actually just plain horrible). And that means staying away from AA2 (for myself at least). Caveat emptor.
February 20 Update: the in-game marketplace is back online except for credit based purchases (which is where the issue exists and why they should’ve only closed off credit purchases to begin with). ArcheAge legacy players are being compensated with 5 days of Patron (AAOG-PATR-ON05) while ArcheAge Unchained players will be compensated with something unknown at this time (this should also be a no-brainer of 5 days of extra subscription, but I guess that doesn’t make sense to them).
