https://www.inven.co.kr/webzine/news/?news=308055 + https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/19535/krafton-greenlights-tera-2
Uhm yeah. Wake me up when we see some serious resources backing this.
There’s some key takeaways from this… currently just 4 people; it’s a small team basically comprised of a few veterans who have been with Bluehole since the early days, worked on TERA, and who did not like how TERA PC’s development came to a close. Until Krafton PR (KRAPTON) puts out an actual loud throated corporate press release message, glitzy cinematic trailer on a video site, AND MMORPG development is once again noted in their investor relations material, I’ll remain skeptical about this.
Krafton itself wound down investing in MMORPG development long before Elyon was shutdown (I mean what Ascent: Infinite Realm ended up turning into and how Elyon was so bland kind of highlights things). The company lost a lot of that design expertise well before 2020 (TERA development also being treated like a design bootcamp for interns since at least the latter part of the prior decade). It’s been mainly PUBG.
The Bluehole Studio subsidiary (the one that held their MMO IP’s has been basically hanging on by a thread since it’s currently only TERA Console; that seems to held together by duct tape).
Bluehole founder Chang Byung-gyu is still the company (Krafton’s) chairman and probably still has some personal nostalgia for those earlier years when TERA was the companies main revenue source. At the same time, Krafton is publicly traded now on the KOSPI and has to deal with actual non-private shareholders unlike the past.
Besides the Subnautica 2 drama, Krafton also recently acquired Eleventh Hour Games for the ARPG Last Epoch (which kind of has part of that player base naturally concerned). The current team is being given independent control but I think we all know how that works over time.
I’m familiar with Krafton’s acquisitions in the past; the old Bluehole Alliance stuff which eventually morphed into the Krafton Game Union, and later Krafton CI (Creative Identity) before they gave up on that whole thing. Eventually the senior/leads get involved with those projects and well… basically most every acquisition made has not fared well. Krafton Challenges (aka FAILURES) exemplifies this (it is more relevant/funnier when you replace all occurrences of the word challenge with failure/fail). BTW, they failed to include MISTOVER (this was a buy to play turn based RPG Krafton quickly abandoned development on after launching in 2019 – they finally delisted it from Steam and Nintendo 3 years later).
Anyway,that arrangement basically created subsidiary units each responsible for their own P&L but would also allow cross utilization of resources. Bonuses were pretty much based on performance of those individual subsidiaries (PUBG personnel for example would be reaping the bulk of the bonuses given how well it has done). No surprise you will have morale issues in other units with that type of structure…
Here is where the irony exists though. One of the companies earliest acquisitions was Ginno Games (Bluehole Ginno) for Immortal (what became Devilian). One of Ginno Games co-founder is Chang-Han Kim (who is now Krafton’s CEO); he was also the CTO and executive producer for this game they were developing since 2009. Immortal was a Diablo inspired title that became an MMO-ARPG. Bluehole’s official acquisition in 2014 overhauled that with assets from TERA; the game releasing in South Korea in 2014 to large fanfare.
They inked publishing deals with Trion (NA/EU), GoodGames (Southeast Asia), and NHN Hangames China. Thailand launched in May 2015 while a heavily modified/forked version was published by Trion in December 2015. The Chinese version never launched. Meanwhile back in South Korea, NHN Hangames was pulling back on their PC portal and refocusing on mobile (VC funding shift in 2015). September 2015, Devilian and TERA PC’s publishing with Hangames ended. TERA was picked up by NEXON but Devilian had no takers so Bluehole Ginno acquired the player data from NHN with the plan to restart (this never happened).
Instead, Bluehole Ginno had signed a large global deal with GAMEVIL to do a Devilian Mobile. PC development in South Korea ended as they worked on this mobile version (which was a mess because the other co-founder, had this misplaced idea that creating a mobile version from the PC code base would be trivial). Only a small skeleton team remained to service the Trion fork (and those updates were slow in releasing and half-baked buggy).
Devilian Mobile did end up launching in the fall of 2016, did the usual mobile front loaded cash grab, and ended up shutting down by November 2017. The PC versions shutdown in March (Trion) and May (GoodGames though their server had been mostly offline for the 6 months prior due to technical issues) 2018.
This particular studio (Bluehole Ginno was on the ropes but Chang-Han Kim pitched a bunch of ideas (in blindfold, throw dart at board, and see what sticks fashion). One of those was talking with ARMA modder Brendan Greene (PlayerUnknown) for a battle royale type of game and the rest became history with PUBG. Bluehole Ginno which handled the development of PUBG eventually became PUBG Corporation (with Chang-Han Kim as its CEO), Bluehole, Inc restructured/rebranded to Krafton, and Chang-Han Kim was eventually made CEO of Krafton.
If you managed to read this entire thing, this is really the “readers digest” version of this. There’s way more drama involved. I personally have no confidence with Krafton doing any sort of follow on to TERA correctly because their entire corporate leadership and structuring is beyond a mess (let alone not having the kind of designers and team in place to properly do MMO’s, let alone people who had direct involvement with OG TERA to know any better).
Thus I see this article on Inven as hopium inspired versus something with the actual full backing of Krafton’s “leadership”. And I already know how CH Kim runs things (for the record, I believe on the software engineering side, he’s competent; he was a top KAIST graduate). I do question his overall business acumen though as CEO; that Subnautica 2 drama for example is cracked including Krafton’s corporate legal/PR messaging (it’s like those crazy PUBG lawsuits they filed in the past).
P.S. If any major industry site that covers gaming/MMO’s decides to cover this oddball posting from Inven, they REALLY ought to connect with media sources in the South Korean gaming industry and work with them to get clarification DIRECTLY from KRAFTON (this actually goes for ANY KMMO that plans to eventually makes it way to the west).
Why? You are NOT going to get the information from the subsidiary folks (they don’t get all of that from corporate in South Korea). There is a distinct business culture difference; you will need to speak to an actual South Korean (the ones who are actual management/authorized to provide a more accurate/source worthy note). This isn’t racist; it’s just how lot of the business organization is done in what is an ethnically homogenous country as most Asian countries are.
Note: I personally don’t believe this is even worthy of dropping an tip to MassivelyOP (they are the only site I’ve been willing to send tidbits to since their roots are in bloggers covering games). UPDATE: I missed their August 5th posting for some reason; they had posted a short regurgitation of the Inven article with absolutely no additional research/trying to reach out to some South Korean gaming media about this (sadly, they’ve become no different from what I had written about before).
For those who don’t know, just because something appears on Inven (KR or Global), does not mean the information is accurate. Sure, Inven is an influential site for gaming. These webzine postings are often times made to sound more important (word “reporter” used for example) because some of this is about “shoot first before verifying all sources for accuracy”. South Korea’s equivalent of Wikipedia covers some of this.
Basically, the tepid comments in response to this webzine post highlights it didn’t gain any traction (the lack of a KRAFTON press release regarding all of this is telling and as I noted above, I will only believe the company is getting back into MMO development again is if it is a huge part of their IR prospectus).
