In more TERA related news, PLAYWITH announced they will be terminating the service of TERA (SEA) with server closure slated for January 9, 2020.
All is not lost for that player base (I guess I am one since I leveled a character to 65 there just to monitor their handling of the game) though since Gameforge will be taking over the publishing rights for the region. Krafton will be working on setting up an account migration system per the notice.
Is this closure surprising? Not really. Initially, the region had a decent player base (lot of players were originally trying to play on NA even with poor latency so having a Thai/SEA publisher was seen as a plus). The issue however is PLAYWITH (bare minimal staffing) along with recent designs from Krafton (including the ridiculous 65-70 grind) which have driven players away (bad combination).
I’ll be blunt… I don’t know how cognizant Krafton’s leadership is with the negative feedback loop regarding the state of TERA (especially starting from patch v80). I have an entire series of postings chronicling my leveling progress (by not tryharding that process) that is part of the TERA tagged entries which as of the Exodor patch (v87), has killed my desire to finish even the last 60% to hit 70. I don’t feel the situation is at the point where I will do a series of prognostication style of postings like I did with Devilian when it became clear that both Bluehole Ginno and Trion had lost the plot… but it is getting close since K-TERA already merged to a single server as they released the level 70 patch there (way before the rest of the layers of RNG content was released over the course of this year) and I am predicting that En Masse Entertainment (EME) the NA publisher will need to eliminate the PvP server (Kaiator) and merge to a single PvE server (like K-TERA) sometime next year.
EME itself has to be aware of the thin line they are on because their revenues are highly dependent on TERA (and they only have Closers and two small games that are in concert with the Netflix series and haven’t been successful at landing anything substantial). TERA console (both PS4 and Xbox) player populations have dropped off into this blackhole. My point is that TERA will be heading into year 8 in 2020 (I guess year 9 for Korea) where it is just logical where the core player base is going to contract to the most hardest of the diehards (I’m not a tryhard diehard but I am one of these “last one standing” since I still login and play; just at an increasingly lower engagement rate). K-TERA’s product director has to make the right decisions in 2020 though if they don’t want retention numbers to drop off a cliff where the above could become reality for several other regions.
