아르피엘 (Arpiel)

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

~ the obituary ~

The full Korean title is 수신학원 아르피엘, which puts it in a school. The setting is an academy attended by beast-kin students in a world that has survived something the game calls a collapse of space and time, and you played one of six named characters through it. It is an anime-shaped premise rendered as a Korean PC role-playing game, and in 2015 that was already a slightly old-fashioned thing for Nexon to be launching, with the market moving onto phones around it.

Nexon published it. A smaller outfit called NGINE Studio built it, and Nexon bought the rest of that studio in May 2018, seven months before closing its game. The testing ran long in the way Korean launches do: a three-day mini-test in March 2015, a closed beta in June, a second one across the end of October, a booth at G-STAR in November, then the open beta on 3 December. It was free to play with a cash shop and a second currency called orbs.

The marketing around the launch was heavier than the game turned out to deserve. There were tie-in webtoons running on Kakao Page and Battle Comics, reported at more than two hundred thousand readers. There was the G-STAR booth with cosplayers for the playable cast. And there was an anime.

~ the case file ~

~ the anime that never aired ~

It was called 아르피엘: 6개의 운명, Arpiel: 6 Destinies, one destiny for each of the six playable characters. The studio was Red Dog Culture House. The Korean trade press covering the announcement in November 2015 gives it as eleven episodes of twelve minutes each, to be released free in the second half of 2016, with the broadcast channel still undecided at the time of writing. Nexon built a dedicated branding site for it on the game's own domain and that site stayed up for years.

As far as I can establish, not one episode ever came out. The Korean encyclopedia entry says the project was shelved and formally dropped when the game closed, though it cites nothing for that. An anime database carries the series with a runtime, a status of finished, and a count of zero episodes aired out of eleven, which is a database doing its best with a thing that was announced and then stopped existing. The branding site had no episode links on it at any capture I looked at.

Note the order of events, because it is the whole shape of this one. The anime was commissioned before the game opened, as a way of making people care about six characters. The game then ran for three years without it.

~ the wind-down ~

Nexon gave thirty-one days of notice, which is the decent end of normal. The notice went up at 10:56 on 5 November 2018 under the title 서비스 종료 안내 and said the company had decided to end the Arpiel service as of 6 December. Its stated reason is a single clause: 만족스러운 서비스를 지속할 수 없다는 판단 하에, under a judgment that satisfactory service could not be continued. No numbers, no blame.

The shutdown came in two steps, both pinned to the regular Thursday maintenance window. After the 8 November maintenance new sign-ups stopped and both shops closed, so nobody could spend money into a thing with a month to live. After the 6 December maintenance, in the notice's words, the game and the homepage both ended.

~ 541 bytes ~

The Archive caught the main page on 5 December at 12,376 bytes, still live. Two days after the end it caught it again at 541. What fits in that is the headline 아르피엘 서비스 종료 안내, one sentence saying the service ended on Thursday 6 December 2018, a thank-you addressed to 수신학원 학생 여러분, the students of Susin Academy, and two links, one to a refund notice and one to the customer center.

The domain now answers with a redirect to Nexon's front page, where nothing records that the game existed. The encyclopedia entry that carries the date has no references on it anywhere, so the only reason the sixth of December is a fact rather than a rumor is that Nexon's own page survived long enough to be copied.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »