Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Bless is shutting down.
It’s Bless Unleashed this time. Our readers will remember that Bless Online originally launched in the west on PC back in 2018, and it was a mess; it saw several server closures, a corporate merge, and then a sunset in 2019. A few months later, Neowiz and Round8Studio announced a console version of the game that shared the IP but little else; it dropped in 2020, and then a PC version of the console version released in 2021. That hasn’t gone well over the last year either. It changed publishers abruptly, killed off its content cadence, announced blockchain integration, and then as of its first birthday, pretended all that never happened. Oh, and don’t forget Bless Mobile and Bless Global! It’s been super weird.
And now it’s super over, at least on console.
“We’ve been publishing Bless Unleashed in partnership with Round8 since 2020, and we’ve enjoyed our time with our wonderful players,” console publisher Bandai Namco says. “Unfortunately, this time is coming to an end. Our agreement with Round8 has come to an end, and we will not be able to continue supporting the game. This was a hard decision for us, but we will be closing the servers at the end of November.”
Bandai Namco says it will keep CS service going through the end of the year, but the servers go dead on November 30th. The cash shop has already stopped taking money, instead flagging all items to 1 Lumena, so you have three months to have fun with that. “We will continue to run in-game GM events until the servers close,” the company concludes.
It does look as if the PC version will continue, as Valofe not only announced no sunset yesterday but also put in a patch.
Our condolences to the players and original developers of this IP.
