Pmang will be terminating their Japan service of TERA PC on April 20, 2022 (the Japanese version on console will remain in service since that is being run directly by Bluehole). They have been running the game in Japan since the service was transferred from NHN Hangames (when they switched the focus of their portal service in Korea and Japan to mobile titles) back on August 14, 2014. This is really sad news for Japanese players since they were instrumental to what became the long term survival of the game (elin costume request and its success, allowed the game to transition to free to play from its original buy to play, and subscription business model).
https://www.famitsu.com/news/202201/19248289.html
Part of this isn’t surprising news given that Krafton is now a publicly trade company in South Korea, and the TERA franchise as a whole across all regions, has been consistently bleeding players. The Japanese region however has been one of the better performing ones besides the Korean server, but that really isn’t saying much when the general trend has been declining over time.
The focus in their most recent Q3 filing is PUBG. While Krafton does not break out each title individually, extrapolation points to Elyon and TERA being very small blips grouped in with PUBG in the PC column. And here is what is telling. From the first quarter that Krafton reported (Q3 2020), PC revenues dropped from 61.2 billion KRW to 59.9 billion KRW. In Q1 2021, PC revenues rebounded slightly to 66.1 billion KRW due to revenues (primarily from packs pre-orders for those who did not cancel them when Kakao switched the business model to free to play) from the launch of Elyon in the west. The large jump in Q2/Q3 2021 is attributed to PUBG (since I don’t play or keep track of updates, I utilized Steam Charts (for NA) to see the bumps in concurrency numbers which usually are attributed to updates).
Basically, the combination of both Elyon and TERA, are relatively flat or trending negative as far as revenue growth is concerned. Console is no better where all three titles are flat with a large drop off in Q3 2021. TERA PC’s last real major update was the release of the Baldera region in August 2021. Besides the recent global dungeon tournament, the game has been running on auto-pilot. One telling sign with Gameforge though, was a 70% TERA Thaler sale back in December.
I’ve never seen Gameforge (which handles most of the other regions besides RU) [EDIT: thanks for the correction sati from Discord] discount it by that much (and this was after the prior weeks 40% discount; most times, the weekend discount is 30-35%). One could say this was because of the Christmas weekend (to which I counter, that was not the case last year). The more standard rationale is the publisher trying to meet their contractual requirements (metrics normally include revenues, MAU, CCU, connection time).
Pmang noted that it would be difficult to provide the service they wanted to their players after close discussions with Bluehole. As a result, the decision was made to end the service. In plain english, it sounds like they were in renegotiation talks regarding their publishing contract, and decided that the terms weren’t conducive.
Bluehole has made no overtures to run the JP service for PC themselves, and there has been no other publisher that has stepped up either. Gameforge would have been a natural since they did just that for the SEA region (and took over for NA when En Masse closed). But that was a different time when the game in EU was in a much better state. IMHO, Gameforge’s current performance with all of the TERA regions they operate, is doing poorly and they are no longer in a position to absorb another region. There is also the possibility that Bluehole has decided to no longer offer the publishing rights to another publisher once a region shutters.
Some folks have thus been speculating whether the end of TERA is on the horizon. The lack of development in terms of new content, is the tell. This reminds me of that period in 2017 when Bluehole Ginno was completely ignoring the development of Devilian PC (it looks and feels exactly the same where I had predicted the game was on a clear path to closure). The new content drought is problematic, as were the recent gear changes.
Myself, I’ve pretty much just been logging in to futilely collect my daily premium (TERA Club) rewards (that 1 year sub I had literally went to waste since I really haven’t played since the Baldera patch 109 went live). In a little under a month, that sub will end (I had purchased that shortly after Gameforge took over in order to get an extra set of Mystel wings and Winged Laurel’s by buying two discounted 180 day TERA Club sub), and I’ll stop logging in daily. Even though I am just one player, it will look like a player retention drop given the already low numbers.
None of this does provide any clue as to the future of TERA on the PC though except that it doesn’t look very bright. What I do know is that the MMORPG market is no longer a strong focus for Krafton (Elyon did not turn out well, and what was released has not been the hit that both Bluehole and Kakao Games were hoping it would be), and that another quarter of no new content updates fo TERA, will be troubling signs that the game is being transitioned to maintenance mode (where they will let exist contracts expire, and see about re-negotiations then, or maybe shuttering the entire franchise).
