Astellia

» see astellia-mmo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

By 2019 my evenings went to computer vision work for drones, not to Korean MMO launches, and Astellia arrived and left inside a window I was not watching at all. It is a short window. The game ran a little under twenty-five months in the West and about thirty-three from its Korean launch.

Studio 8 built it and Barunson E&A owned most of Studio 8. That is the same Barunson E&A that produced Parasite, which took the Palme d'Or and four Oscars in the same year this game launched, so the parent company had a spectacular 2019 and it had nothing to do with the MMO. Nexon published Astellia in Korea from 3 January 2019, then walked away from the deal after twelve months: on 16 January 2020 the Korean service passed to Barunson to run itself.

The western version came out on 27 September 2019 with a head start for preorders from the 20th, sold as a box rather than a subscription. Barunson had adapted it for the market by removing the pay-to-win items and loosening the gender lock on classes. By April 2020 Barunson had let the game go too, handing operations back to Studio 8, which set up a new publisher with a partner. A free-to-play version called Astellia Royal appeared on Steam in March 2021. Seven months after that it was over.

~ the dossier ~

~ the astels ~

The one idea Astellia had that nobody else had was in the name. Astels were summonable companions you collected like cards and called in to cover whatever your character was bad at. Squishy melee build, summon the one that tanks. It sat somewhere between a pet system and a deck, and the marketing materials called the game an MMORPG plus TCG, which was accurate and did not help anybody understand it.

~ the publisher carousel ~

Count the hands this game passed through in under three years. Nexon in Korea for twelve months, then Barunson running it directly, then Barunson giving it back to the developer in April 2020, then a new publisher assembled around Studio 8, then Friends Games Corp holding the western operation at the end. Every handover was announced as a fresh start with better alignment behind it.

There is a version of this story where a publisher shutting a game down is the villain. This is not that version. Nexon dropped it after a year because almost nobody in Korea was playing it, and every party after that inherited an audience that was already gone.

~ eleven days ~

Studio 8 announced the closure on 10 August 2021 and set the date at 29 October. Astellia Royal got the identical notice the same day. Then, at some point between August and October, the Steam announcement was quietly edited and the date moved forward. On Monday 18 October both games went offline, eleven days early, with no separate notice that anyone recorded. Players who had planned a last week in the world lost it to a text edit.

~ the blockchain afterlife ~

In December 2022 the game came back in the West as Astel of Atra, in which the Astels were tradeable NFTs on Polygon and you needed to own one to earn the in-game cryptocurrency. It was among the first Korean play-to-earn MMO conversions. It lasted about two months. Astel of Atra shut down on 10 February 2023, and the Korean website was gone by that May.

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