KRAFTON has a section on their website entitled “Our Challenges” which was inspired by a display of their failures which they had at G-STAR 2018. The heading describes in bold capital letters: “ENDLESS CHALLENGE THROUGH TRIAL AND ERROR, THE IMPETUS FOR KRAFTON IN BECOMING A ‘DISTINGUISHED GAME PRODUCTION COMPANY’. WE WILL CEASELESSLY CHALLENGE TO PRODUCE FINEST GAMES”
A more humorous way to look at this is to replace the word “challenge” with “fail/failure”: “ENDLESS FAILURE THROUGH TRIAL AND ERROR, THE IMPETUS FOR KRAFTON IN BECOMING A ‘DISTINGUISHED GAME PRODUCTION COMPANY’. WE WILL CEASELESSLY FAIL TO PRODUCE FINEST GAMES”
What is key to note is as time went on, most of the developed titles had a lifespan in South Korea of less than an year (most of the listed dates are when the game was launched and then shutdown in Korea). Some of the PC and mobile titles were also published in other regions (and may have had a longer life until they were sunset). Basically, the above capitalized sentence is equivalent to them putting a blindfold on, throwing darts, and hoping at least some of them hit the bullseye.
The garbage they are trying to peddle is that all of these titles were effectively failed experiments when that is far from the reality. Devilian PC for example was a 5 year effort to bring a Diablo inspired MMO to market. Krafton’s newly named CEO Chang-Han Kim (who remains as CEO of PUBG Corp) was Devilian’s executive producer and also the co-founder and CTO of Ginno Games (which was acquired by Bluehole Studio and renamed Bluehole Ginno; the subsidiary was later renamed PUBG Corp). Prior to the acquisition by Bluehole, Devilian originally started out as a Korean Diablo clone with the codename Immortal. The game was originally going to be called Immortal Online and had little resemblance to what was eventually released as Devilian (the Bluehole acquisition resulted in a massive overhaul in terms of game systems and graphics by leveraging IP from TERA). In plain english, a lot of money post-Bluehole acquisition was pumped into the game.
But it also wasn’t complete by a long shot when it soft launched in South Korea in July 2014 with a glitzy media campaign. Since isometric (fixed quarter view) MMO’s are a niche, the game ended up having a niche following. The promised follow on updates with major content never happened in Korea though; the company was chasing publishing agreements in other regions (Thailand, North America, Europe, and China) while not fully directing development into completing designs (the Chinese version was never released). Furthermore, this was also a period of transition for venture capital from PC MMO’s to mobile gaming. That change ended up being a double whammy for Devilian (the dead end in major content resulted in a contraction in player population which made it an early candidate for removal from Hangames whose parent NHN Entertainment, had announced shifting their portal publishing from PC MMO’s to mobile games).
Ironically, the Thai and NA/EU versions ended up receiving some new content (the Thai version was for the most part a localized version of the Korean release while the NA/EU version had major changes made to it where it was its own fork). But most of these were done with a much smaller team since major development had wound down after the Korean server was shutdown (and decision made to not republish in Korea). Again in plain english, there was no actual dedication to development post-launch.
And that has been the takeaway for the majority of Krafton’s games with the exception of TERA and PUBG. And even with TERA (the company’s original bread winner), the effort was half-ass. If it weren’t for PUBG becoming this accidental success (far surpassing TERA in revenue and profits), the company would probably still be known as Bluehole relying solely on TERA for most of its revenue with ever increasing marginalization. Now (with Chang-Han Kim as Krafton CEO), the company is considering going public (so that they can gain access to the capital markets to throw even more crap on the wall to see what sticks). This again is why I jokingly/seriously refer to the company as KRAPTON (given how they’ve released a ton of crap recently).
The corporate rebranding (which they’ve pushing hard since 2018) is more about this impending initial public offering than actually creating high quality games though. The company can’t even get Ascent: Infinite Realm (their other PC MMORPG which has its funding roots coming from the tail end of the PC venture capital investment in Korea) out the door. The company continues to burn through capital on a growing list of failures though where my takeaway is that they aren’t really learning anything from those prior mistakes.
