Today is the day that TERA’s Japanese servers sunset… and unfortunately, the day heralds bad news for the rest of TERA’s PC playerbase in the west and Korea too.
“TERA’s developers, Bluehole, have decided to cease work on TERA,” western publisher Gameforge announced this morning. “After much consideration, the team in South Korea have come to the conclusion that they are no longer able to offer you the exciting and satisfying content you deserve. As the last remaining publisher of TERA, it is with a heavy heart that we must respect Bluehole’s decision, and will also have to shut down the game. The TERA servers will be switched off at 10 AM CEST (4 AM EDT) on 30th June 2022. Until then, we’ll be running some permanent events, in the hope that you’ll at least be able to enjoy these final months in Arborea. After nearly 10 long years, the TERA legend must sadly come to an end.”
The news probably won’t come as a huge shock to players, as even we had noticed that TERA PC hadn’t received much attention or development from Bluehole ever since Krafton reorganized, shuttered En Masse Entertainment, and spun Bluehole off as an independent subsidiary to handle TERA and Elyon back in 2020; Gameforge had maintained the game on PC in Europe over its lifetime along with the North American playerbase for the last year and a half. It’s all a bit of a shame, as TERA’s western version was once a powerhouse money-maker.
According to Gameforge’s FAQ, registrations and purchasing will come to an end on May 31st, followed by the closure of all remaining PC servers in the early hours of June 30th. There will be no refunds, nor options to transfer elsewhere as there are no other PC servers alive.
“Gameforge has happily hosted a great community in TERA for almost 10 years now, and would have happily served players even longer, but without the support of the developers this is not feasible,” Gameforge says, actually sounding pretty sad about all this.
Krafton and Bluehole haven’t made an announcement to the western playerbase, though they told their Korean PC players this morning; they also haven’t yet made a similar announcement for TERA’s console portion, so we don’t know what’s going on there yet. Worth noting here is that while Elyon hasn’t taken off, Krafton still owns the enormously popular and lucrative PUBG, so it’s not clear why the company couldn’t at least keep the servers online in maintenance mode when far smaller companies have done so.
Our sympathies go out to the players affected by the decision; the game’s subreddit does have a few discussions about rogue servers that are suddenly quite relevant.
