Aeria Games

» see aeriagames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Aeria Games opened in 2006 in Santa Clara, California, publishing free-to-play games it had not built. The catalogue came mostly from Taiwanese and Korean studios, and the business was localization and the cash shop rather than development. Two years in, the company opened an office in Berlin. The branch outgrew the trunk, and Berlin ended up holding the headquarters.

For a while it was the one doing the buying. In January 2012 Aeria took all of ijji, NHN's free-to-play portal, and spent six months moving ten million accounts onto Aeria logins before ijji's own services came down that July. Aeria ran Scarlet Blade in North America and inherited GunZ after Maiet's work had passed through ijji. Being the company that absorbed other people's account systems was, for several years, most of what Aeria was for.

Then it got absorbed. In February 2014 ProSiebenSat.1, the German television group, bought the worldwide PC games business, Aeria Games Europe GmbH included, and had little appetite for operating games itself. The whole holding went into gamigo AG in exchange for a 33 percent share of the merged publisher, a deal that completed in May 2016 and cost about 100 of the 260 jobs in Berlin. The Aeria name stayed up on the website for another six years after the company behind it had stopped existing on its own.

On 20 December 2022 gamigo announced it was retiring what it called old infrastructure and technology, and named the Aeria Games website and backend specifically. The portal closed on 28 February 2023. A crawler reached the front page eight days before that and found it still advertising Aura Kingdom and Shaiya in the usual way, with nothing on it to suggest the end. On 1 March the domain answered with a redirect instead of a page, and from 2 March the archive stopped getting anything back at all.

~ the dossier ~

~ the acquirer acquired ~

Eleven years separate the two migrations, and Aeria stood on opposite sides of them. In 2012 it was the destination: ijji's players were told their accounts and balances were moving to Aeria, and the brand they had registered with went into a sale document. In 2023 Aeria's own players were told the same kind of thing about a destination chosen for them.

Where the games went was settled first. Aura Kingdom and Grand Fantasia returned to X-Legend, the Taiwanese studio that had made them. Shaiya and Last Chaos went to Fawkes Games. What gamigo was switching off was never the software, it was the registry sitting underneath it.

~ what the code was for ~

gamigo's instructions were unusually specific about the handover. Players were told to check the email address on their account while the portal was still up, because the transfer would arrive there as a one-time token to redeem on the new publisher's site. Gameplay data was to be anonymized on the way across. Once the portal was gone, support could not look an account up and issue a replacement code, because there would be nothing left to look up. Players were told to spend their remaining Aeria Points first as well, since currency bought from one publisher is worth nothing to the next one.

~ the refugees ~

The quiet cruelty in that arrangement sits in the email address. An account made in 2009 was registered to whatever provider a person was using in 2009, and a good share of those inboxes have been unreadable for a decade. Anyone who had drifted away from Shaiya and half meant to come back some weekend had their character converted into a message sent to an address nobody opens.

I was never on this portal. The catalogue was anime MMORPGs licensed into English and German for a Western audience that wanted something Korean-shaped and free, and that scene ran past me without catching. What I recognize here is the registration address rather than the game. Anyone who has been online since the nineties is carrying a couple of those, retired but never quite deleted, and gamigo's last official act was to post years of somebody's characters to one of them.

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