Striking Distance is a wholly owned subsidiary of PUBG Corporation which itself, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Krafton.  And as per the above intro, the goal of this new studio is to expand the “original narrative experience of the PUBG Universe” which can be construed as creating story mode games based on PUBG (since Striking Distance will be the publisher of such games).

I guess this is Krafton’s “solution” to trying to expand the PUBG franchise and IP beyond its battle royale roots since this licensing of their franchises has been a goal of Krafton for several years now.  They failed with trying to make noise about copyright infringement claims against Fortnite BR for example.  The licensing angle was something they originally tried with Devilian (no real takers) and then expanded to TERA (with most of the efforts focusing on mobile versions of the game for which Krafton ended up acquiring at least two of the previously independent studios).  The difference is that TERA at least has some lore as defined by the original designers (and has subsequently been screwed up by different teams over the past few years).

Pouring money into designing and developing PC MMO’s is no longer the thing though (and mobile versions tend to be an offshoot of what exists in the PC space and have inherent limitations due to form factor considerations (touch based screens being the biggest).  So Krafton has been looking for the next “secret sauce” and are looking at expanding their offerings (turn based RPG MISTOVER being one of the ones in the works along with mobile Project BB).

The problem that I see is that PUBG doesn’t really have much to go on besides a cast iron pan, weekend warrior/combat casual cosmetic (which again aren’t very uniquely themed), and an already common phrase coined a long time ago (winner winner chicken dinner) for which they filed a lawsuit against the Chinese ministry for rejecting a trademark request based on the Chinese translation of that phrase.  I suppose there is always a starting point (even if it needs to be retroactively applied).  And since PUBG Corp has money to burn (and an unlimited amount of feces to fling), they might as well try to see what will stick.  All I know is this is yet another attempt to try to parlay the unintended success of PUBG into something which can be leveraged long term for which the revenues can be used to fund other projects.

PUBG Corp CEO Chang-Han Kim was second in command (co-founder) and replaced Park when Bluehole Ginno was renamed to PUBG Corp.  So he is continuing with these attempts to find some form of intellectual property for PUBG via another (stupid) lawsuit (the first was filing a copyright infringement lawsuit against Epic Games in South Korea regarding Fortnite which they quickly dropped a few weeks later).

https://mmoculture.com/2019/04/pubg-developer-sues-china-government-board-for-rejecting-trademark-request/

PUBG Corporation’s original trademark claim for the Chinese translated equivalent of “Chicken Dinner” ended up being rejected by the countries National Intellectual Property Administration so they are appealing that decision by filing this lawsuit against that agency.  Yes, these folks are off their rockers.

In english language circles, the phrase “winner winner chicken dinner” has been around LONG before PUBG was ever in existence and that is obviously why PUBG Corp isn’t bothering trying to trademark it in english speaking countries.  Translated equivalents (especially in a large country like China) seems to be their corporate legals “brilliant” (read idiotic) idea of finding some sort of intellectual property they can tie to the PUBG franchise.

Regardless, it’s a generic term (as in actually describing an actual chicken dinner) regardless of language and just like their weak copyright claims against Epic Games, any attempts to trademark a translated equivalent of “winner winner chicken dinner” wouldn’t even fly.  I’m actually waiting for these folks to try to trademark the frying pan…

Krafton (formerly Bluehole) subsidiary PUBG Corporation, saw its main game generate $920 million USD in revenue last year with $310 million USD of that being profit.  53% of that revenue came from Asia.

What is more impressive is that $790 million of that revenue came from the PC version (console made up $60 million).  Really not bad for a title that wasn’t even expected to be this successful.

Our goal is to always work to give you a better battle royale experience. To do that, we know that we have to ship more performance improvements and additional bug fixes. We agree with the criticisms of the game that many of you have made recently, including comments that our efforts need to be more effective and that the game still needs more improvement. We greatly appreciate this feedback and we know that all of it comes from a place of support and love for PUBG. 

Right now we’re developing new plans to resolve various problems facing PUBG, prioritizing server performance, client-side performance, anti-cheat, and bugs. While we’ll continue shipping new content and preparing for PGI over the next few weeks, we intend to have more concrete info to share about these plans shortly after PGI is over. Our dev team is doing their best to make sure that our plans are well-laid out so we can announce meaningful and detailed changes.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/games/578080/announcements/detail/1687045485858884730

Rhetorical question…. How many times are they going to repeat the exact same thing regarding exploits and performance?  Bluehole plus optimization does not compute (i.e. non sequitur).  It’s a good thing I only periodically post about Bluehole’s (and their subsidiaries) BS and not actually pay to play PUBG.

No specific reason was provided for the withdrawal of the infringment lawsuit.  Tencent may have weighed in since they have a 40% stake in Epic Games while they have invested over $470 million in Bluehole (approximately a 10% stake of the parent company which owns PUBG Corp).

However, a few of us (including former Devilian player and colleague Giko who has his points of contacts in South Korea and has been back working/living there again) were firing shots back at Bluehole about the stupidity of that move given they were putting their entire portfolio of IP’s at risk due to their licensing of Epic’s Unreal Engine.

Epic didn’t blink one bit once the lawsuit was filed in Bluehole’s local jurisdiction and it actually would have been stunningly glorious if Bluehole ended up proceeding because “in our (mine and Giko) humble opinions”, Bluehole would have had its ass handed to them on a platter for coming into violation of their contract where Epic would’ve exercised the nuclear option to pull their license for ALL of Bluehole’s titles.

There are some folks who believe that Epic wouldn’t take that route against a huge revenue generator (which they receive a percentage of via the licensing of the engine) because it would be like shooting themselves in the foot.  The problem though is it is part of the terms written in the contract (normally associated with litigation by the licensee against the licensor usually when it comes to flaws in the engine itself; in this case, the lawsuit was nothing to do with that but was something that accused Epic Games for plagiarism on some VERY flimsy grounds which as I stated in my prior linked post, was similar to the 1988 copyright infringement lawsuit that Apple lost against Microsoft.

IMHO and based on Bluehole/PUBG Corp’s flawed initial lawsuit, I wouldn’t have looked at the pulling of all of their licenses (by Epic) as having a chilling effect with their other licensee’s of the engine.  I would have looked at it as sending a signal to other companies to not file stupid lawsuits that don’t hold a lot of merit.

PUBG Corp (formerly Bluehole Ginno) had previously made noise before about not being pleased with Epic Games (accusing them of copying portions of PUBG for use in Fortnite when the latter added a battle royale mode).  As I opined in my prior post, the battle royale concept is not something that PUBG invented.

PUBG does license Unreal Engine 4 from Epic Games which creates an interesting situation since PUBG’s success does translate into increased revenues for Epic (there are varying licensing terms depending on certain metrics including total player population).  It may also create a legal quandry depending on the licensing terms (in regards to litigation of the licensee against the licensor).  Like would Epic Games terminate PUBG Corp’s license for Unreal Engine 4 (which means they would also kill a revenue source from that license) and if so, how much that would put PUBG (the game) out of commission until it can be redone in another engine.  I’m no lawyer though so this is just me streaming some thoughts out of my head…

Additionally, this may not even stand up in a court of law because Apple for the most part, lost their 1988 copyright infringement lawsuit against Microsoft.  In short, Apple had accused Microsoft of copying a number of graphical user interface elements from the Mac’s operating system in Windows 2.0.x.  Part of that was due to the original agreement between the two companies prior to Windows 2.0.  Other parts were due to the judge ruling that certain things could not be copyrighted.  Again, IANAL.

Some of this may also be predicated on how much ducks PUBG Corp lined up in terms of registering for trade dress protection where they feel so strongly that the UI elements (which need to be non-functional) presents a strong case that makes PUBG’s interface an important part of distinguishing their game from other ones that have a similar battle royale mode.

I’m thinking that Fortnite and PUBG are so generally different looking in terms of visual artwork that this won’t even stand either.  I have no sympathy for PUBG Corp given how their preceding organizational structure (Bluehole Ginno) handled Devilian when it came to developing new content for their publishing licensees (as I noted before, their NA/EU publisher Trion Worlds contributed greatly to the demise of Devilian and Bluehole Ginno in general when they downsized the team just 6 months post launch (with no actual producer to work with Ginno for addressing issues and new content) which eventually led to decreasing player population/revenues (at which point, Ginno had to look for another avenue of revenues; thus the PUBG angle).  That shouldn’t mean you just stop supporting that title (Devilian) like what happened near the end (it amounts to professional neglect).

As I mentioned before, PUBG Corp’s CEO is Chang-Han Kim.  He was a co-founder of Ginno Games (what became Bluehole Ginno after being acquired by Bluehole Studios which is now known simply as Bluehole).  He served as CTO and also was the executive producer for Devilian.  He’s gone from the #2 guy dealing with a floundering franchise to the head honcho leading a wildly successful (completely unexpected) one.  Don’t let that success get to your head because something like a PUBG isn’t what you would call rife with intellectual property.  And just like how at one time, DayZ was all the rage, players in this particular genre can jump off the ship really quickly when the next FoTM comes out.

Fortnite BR has been doing well in its own right which could be why PUBG Corp is reacting this way.  I question the wisdom though when Bluehole in general, licenses Unreal Engine (both 3 & 4) for their main titles (TERA uses an older build of UE3, their upcoming title Ascent: Infinite Realm uses UE3, and PUBG uses UE4).  A nasty lawsuit could backfire on Bluehole completely since Epic Games could always exercise the nuclear option should this lawsuit be in breach of the licensing contract and terms of use agreement; where that nuclear option is to terminate ALL of Bluehole’s rights to use the Unreal Engine.  And that aspect isn’t a pretty one because that would effectively mean the end to all of those games (and a huge amount of legal troubles for Bluehole in general given their existing publishing contracts).

PUBG Corp sounds like it is a separate company but it is still a subsidiary of Bluehole (it was just renamed from Bluehole Ginno).  It maintains its own corporate structure (in order to manage the now successful PUBG franchise) but it is still tied to Bluehole.  Even their corporate logo spells out that relationship.

Not one of them as far as I know, bothered to use their media credentials and contacts to directly interview Bluehole about the franchise.  Most everything written regarding the reasons for the mutual decision by both Bluehole (Ginno) and Trion Worlds to bring the game to a close, has been attributed to what I wrote in my open letter (though none of these media sites directly attributed the details that I posted to me since after all, I’m just posting with an online pseudonym; I don’t care about that though).

And what I posted in that open letter is NOT even the full story as to why things transpired as they did since I intended to do that at some latter date.  Of course, I don’t expect Bluehole to go into detail regarding the deteriorating business relationship aspects that Bluehole Ginno had to deal with once the Devilian team at Trion was downsized and the wrong person let go -> Andrew “Drewcifer” Sipotz and the wrong person left to continue overseeing its operation -> cough, cough Victoria “Firecait” Voss.

In this particular case with Devilian, these MMO news sites effectively just picked up the story from a few sources and then embellished it with their own writing (why I said they are like parrots).  Most of the “Bluehole Ginno stopped working on the game” is based on what I wrote in my open letter.  Yes, I’ve written numerous times before on this blog that they stopped work on the PC version when they shifted resources to complete Devilian Mobile for GAMEVIL (since GAMEVIL made a lucrative pitch to do this massive global marketing promotion for it).  But none of these MMO news site bothered to go directly to the source to get the PR message directly from them (meaning Bluehole).  These folks can’t even source me because I’m just a blogger using a pseudonym (but that doesn’t mean I don’t have sources or industry contacts either).

With Devilian Mobile, Bluehole Ginno at the time was a small team and had no vast experience with mobile; Ginno’s other co-founder and former CEO Won Hee-Park (who was replaced by fellow co-founder Chang-Han Kim once Bluehole Ginno was renamed to PUBG Corp) stated in interviews that he didn’t realize how much more work it required (Park thought mobile was easy since he was previously looking at everything from the point of view of having a fully developed PC MMO and thought adapting parts of it to mobile would be straightforward).

I personally don’t think he fully realized that you just cannot take designs made for a PC MMO, and try to shoehorn them onto a mobile device.  If you want to create an open world style mobile MMO that works well on hand held devices, that part needs to be designed from a mobile perspective where its about touch and touch control systems (and scenes need to also be modified so that you can see stuff on a smaller screen).  So basically, Bluehole Ginno had to design everything from scratch (and thus could not afford to allot resources to the PC version.

And this (again) is the part that bugs me which is what this “semi-rant” is about.  Repeating what I said earlier; none of these MMO news sites (as far as I know) bothered to ask for an interview with PUBG Corp CEO Chang-Han Kim and ask him about what Bluehole has in store for the Devilian franchise that he previously worked on.  None of these sites seemed to even bothered to have researched his credentials; I mean he was a co-founder of Ginno Games.  He was CTO for the company and wore multiple hats including being project director for Bluehole Ginno (after Ginno Games was acquired by Bluehole) and then executive producer for Devilian.  It’s something he has close ties to.  Yet none of these so called MMO news media sites ever bothered to interview him about the franchise directly.

3rd from the left (top row) is Victoria “Firecait” Voss, Rick “Din Othar” White, Chang-Han Kim, Andrew “Drewcifer” Sipotz with the rest of the Devilian team from Bluehole Ginno

You could say that when Drewcifer was the associate producer for Devilian, he could talk gaming with the Bluehole Ginno folks.  A lot of changes were made for Trion despite the fact that development for Devilian had actually stopped (in terms of newly designed content past what had existed in the Korean and Thai versions).  These changes, streamlining, and quality of life improvements being done for Trion were eventually meant to roll back into those other two versions (and then after that, new designs and content considered at which point, development could then resume if conditions were appropriate).

Bluehole Ginno also spent considerable time giving most all of the graphics finetuning and refinement.  The game client was also rewritten with a lot of more options.  One game system that was not even part of the original Devilian design was class-form PVP (battlegrounds and arena).  The game had none of the supporting sub-systems to handle that.  But Bluehole Ginno worked on creating those designs and delivered a nearly 100% working design during Trion’s closed beta (and promised it would be ready by the time the game launched).

The company also had to burn considerable time and resources dealing with the server migration/merge for Trion (many of us players warned Trion about going with two initial servers per region from the start which they failed to heed, and then when we asked them to begin merging them as soon as possible, they would just ignore that feedback and did it for far too long where by the time they rolled out the “megaservers”, the total population in each region had dropped off considertably.

The above PVP example is one of several of the main core changes that Bluehole Ginno performed while Drewcifer was with Trion.  And that continued until the Alvir’s Legacy update which shortly after, there was an executive decision made to downsize the Devilian team which moved Devilian’s senior producer Rick “Din Othar” White to another project (Atlas Reactor at the time which had not been announced) and led to the voluntarily resignation of Andrew “Drewcifer” Sipotz (since he was going to be a pink slip casualty).  After that, it was all downhill because Firecait didn’t really play or understand the details of the game.

So Bluehole Ginno had sunk all of this time and effort at that point, only to have their business partner try to save money on their end, with no captain to steer the ships rudder in the correct direction.  Firecait’s expertise is in backend IT systems; her knowledge of Devilian was cursory at best especially in the finer details.  With that frame of reference, there is no way to “talk shop” with the folks at Ginno who were for the most part, gamers.  And that lack of ability to converse and relate past the language and culture barriers, is why the rest of content rollout for Devilian happened the way it did.   On top of Trion’s (as a company) tendency towards making money whichever way possible with quality being at bottom of the priority list, having the absolute wrong person (Voss) overseeing Devilian were the main contributors towards where we are today.

That slow roll of content and lack of community interaction by Trion caused even more players to leave resulting in dropping shared revenues.  Now put yourself in the shoes as a business person (Ginno’s CEO and Devilian’s executive producer) where you see this negative trend with player concurrency numbers, player retention rates, and dropping revenues from your business partner who is handling the publishing.  Do you just sit back in your seat, twiddle your thumbs, and think everything is going to be alright (while considering how much man hours and thus budgeting was spent to deliver what you did prior to the Alvir’s Legacy patch)?

Can anyone blame them for starting to look at other avenues of revnue like the battle royale game pitch?  I’m not saying Bluehole Ginno is blameless here because I have mentioned before they could have also handled things a little better.  But Trion World’s higher level decisions with what they did to the Devilian team (plus not dealing with a lot of issues before that downsizing), is a huge factor and contributor to what led to the eventual closing of the game.  Din Othar would have been a far better person to remain in charge of Devilian BUT would’ve still had to deal with the lack of support on the community facing end.  There is obviously more to this story but most of that is going to end up on my Devilian-Info site in the future.

I am pretty tired though of many putting far too much blame on Bluehole for not doing enough because they did give their subsidiary Bluehole Ginno a long leash and provided them a lot of support (budgeting, software engineers, grapical artists, technical resources, and access to TERA’s vast intellectual property) to be able to overhaul and change Devilian from what it was when Ginno Games was acquired.

Here… the following is an image of what the dualist (berserker) originally looked like before the proposed Bluehole acquisition and before all of their resources that were poured into the game to overhaul the graphics, the client, game systems, and gameplay.  I would not have played this version because it looked terrible; the whole game looked like this before it was given the Bluehole treatment.

That is why I want to set that record straight… that any anger should be mostly directed at Trion and not Bluehole when it comes to the root cause reasons for the demise of Devilian.  That will become apparent once I complete the “early development” section on Devilian-Info (which will show how ugly the game was in the early days).  I’m not saying Bluehole is perfect either (because they let TERA languish or haven’t bothered putting resources in to optimizing it).  But they did do a lot for Devilian early on, and didn’t see the return on investment they had hoped for especially with a business partner like Trion in the mix.

So there was a point where the numbers just weren’t heading in the right direction and they had no choice but to prioritize the resources in the right places.  They are running a business, not a charity.

Someone can now stick a fork in TERA (as far as actual new content) since Bluehole is just going to ride PUBG and also hope to strike lightning again with their Project W MMO partnership with Kakao (utilizing portions of the revenue windfall for its design/development along with the investment from Kakao).  Yes, I know they are shooting for TERA console beta now in 2018 but that isn’t going to really amount to much since there isn’t going to be any cross play (at least initially since the game there will be at least a patch or two behind what exists on the PC).

Since March 2017 when it was released via Steam’s early access, it has sold over 4 million copies while raking in over $100 million in revenues.  Steam peak CCU’s as well as Twitch viewership numbers for this game are truly staggering (both six digits).

TERA in its first few years was one of the top 4 MMO’s that consistently generated over $100 million in revenues worldwide (2014).  As of 2016, it was still in the top 4 worldwide in terms of revenues.  For Bluehole, PUBG represents a completely new revenue stream that could surpass TERA’s revenues.  This will allow them to put focus on their new MMO which they have been working on (Project W was announced back in 2014) in partnership with Kakao (due to the investment they made in that MMO).  TERA itself will likely not be a huge benefactor unless they can kill 2 birds with one stone by improving the optimization on the PC via the changes being done for the console version (more on that below).

Now that I have been playing TERA regularly in place of Devilian, I am witnessing the exact same issues that plagued Devilian (had to bring it up again for comparisons sake) in terms of recycling content and power creeping things (worse yet, removal of a lot of content and systems including guild Sky Castles, crusades, and the original Island of Dawn starter zone).  It hasn’t reached the level of near abandonment like Devilian though because software engineers still retune/rebalance dungeons as well as insure that daily quest rewards are inline with the content.  But there hasn’t necessarily been a ton of new content either.

The reason why I favored playing Devilian over TERA was because it had the aesthetics of TERA in an isometric camera view along with much simpler ARPG style combat where it is far easier to play unlike TERA’s action combat system which requires more attention and skill.  What I mean is while I do enjoy that style of combat/much more skillful play (TERA’s real time action combat is one of the best where it is extremely visceral and satisfying), there are times when I just want to disengage my brain and lazily play/not be completely focused on positioning and having that cross hair (TERA does not use tabbed targeting which is one of the things I dislike about ArcheAge) laser focused manually on the target.  I could normally play Devilian half asleep or do relatively well when playing it with high latency (during those times I wasn’t in the US); can’t get away doing that in TERA though since it requires far more engagement.

The point is that I believe Bluehole is recognizing the limitations of the original designs for these older games and they’ve made a decision to invest more into these newer titles (PUBG and Project W).  As to what benefits will occur with the PS4 and Xbox One versions of TERA (which will use Unreal Engine 4) for the PC version (which is built on Unreal Engine 3) remains to be seen.  That alone will bring improved graphics and performance which the PC version has sorely lacked.  If the newer engine for console allows them to bring that to the PC, TERA could get a nice shot in the arm in that area.  It still needs actual new content though which given Project W, is not likely to be any sort of high priority.

Some people believe that the success of PUBG will allow Bluehole to invest more in TERA.  Again, TERA on its own has done exceptionally well worldwide but as I am learning from playing it a lot more now, hasn’t necessarily translated into significant content (speaking relative to what exists in the game).  Further design effort into the game seems highly unlikely either because the primary benefactors will be the private investors/venture capitalists that have been backing Bluehole for many years while any capital reinvestment will go towards their newer IP’s.  Project W itself is likely going to be one of the last PC MMO’s they will invest design/development time in given that most of the venture capital money in South Korea is now mobile focused (that is until the pendulum swings in a different direction).

If anything, Bluehole will milk the success of PUBG as much as possible while working on Project W.  Should they ever decide to introduce the above character in the game, the South Korea and Japan numbers for this game could likely jump up significantly from their current single digit percentages.  TERA’s intellectual property (especially as it relates to anything Elin related) is something they will obviously leverage because that is frankly what makes them the most revenue.

Devilian itself as I’ve noted before is a non-factor on the PC side and there is a point where low CCU’s will become an issue that Trion can’t ignore because they are already running the game with skeleton resources (going on almost one year already) in order to cut operating expenses since that property is no longer generating material revenues.  Devilian Mobile is having its lunch eaten now by both Lineage 2 Revolution and NCSoft’s Lineage M (which won’t be released in the west) in South Korea which isn’t good news for Bluehole Ginno.  Once Lineage 2 Revolution releases in North America later this year, the jig may be up for Ginno’s CEO as parent Bluehole may end up deciding to stop wasting any additional resources on that IP (instead choosing to make a proper mobile version of TERA).