Well, Korean players could probably see the writing on the wall when Kakao/XLGAMES shuttered ArcheAge here in the west earlier this year, but now it’s officially happening in ArcheAge’s home country too. Kakao announced last night that after 12 years of operation, ArcheAge’s core servers will shut down in Korea, specifically on March 6th, 2025. Here’s the gist of the message translated by Google:
“[A]s many people in the studio gathered and had serious and deep discussions and concerns about the continuity of the service and its future direction, we came to the conclusion that it would be difficult to provide updates and services that would satisfy the Heirs in the future, and we have made the difficult decision to terminate the service. We are truly sorry to deliver this news to the Heirs who have continued to show affection and love for ArcheAge.”
A plan to conduct limited refunds has also been posted.
Readers will recall that ArcheAge’s story is a sad one: XLGAMES originally partnered with Trion Worlds to bring the sandbox westward back in 2014, but the implosion of Trion sent the game’s western publishing to Gamigo, and then to Kakao in 2021. However, over the years, all those moves – along with unresolved game issues stacked on top of endless new server land rushes, a thin content pipeline, and the dishonest handling of ArcheAge Unchained – clearly took their toll. Last summer, Korean media reported that a major XLGAMES restructure would lead to the closure of ArcheAge in multiple regions. Perhaps Korean players thought they’d survived the XLGAMES’ closure wave, but nope.
XLGAMES has been focusing its ArcheAge attentions on the many-times-delayed and now-rebranded ArcheAge Chronicles, which is not as much an MMORPG as its predecessor.
We note here that there are multiple rogue servers for various flavors of ArcheAge. We delivered our own eulogy for the game earlier this year. Not much more to say. This sucked before, and now it continues to suck in new places.
