ASTRA: Knights of Veda

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

~ the eulogy ~

In 2022 the company that manages BTS decided it wanted to be in games, properly, not just in the licensed-mascot business. HYBE IM was founded that April with about two hundred staff, over half of them developers, and its first releases were careful and small: a rhythm app built on its own artists, and an island-builder tied to BTS. ASTRA: Knights of Veda was the one that was supposed to count. It was a real RPG with a real development studio behind it, shown at Gamescom in August 2023 and at G-Star that November, and Korean coverage at launch described it as the company's debut as a genuine publisher.

The studio was FLINT, a Korean developer whose earlier game 별이되어라! had done well enough to carry a global release in 2015 as Dragon Blaze, and in Japan under a different name again because the obvious one collided with a Taito trademark. ASTRA is that game's sequel and prequel at once, which is why the Korean title translates as Become a Star 2. HYBE took a stake in FLINT to get it made, reportedly because FLINT could not run a worldwide service on its own.

It shipped as one build for everybody on 2 April 2024 at ten in the morning Korean time, on both phone stores and on Steam, covering the Korean and Japanese markets at the same moment as the Western ones. More than three million pre-registrations had come in. The game itself was a 2D side-scrolling action RPG with hand-animated combat and a lot of visual ambition, and the Steam reviews settled at 55% positive across 1,075 of them, with the praise going to the art and the complaints going to the gacha and the controls.

This is recent enough that I have no claim on it at all. A 2024 Korean mobile RPG with a worldwide Steam release was something I could have installed on launch day from where I am sitting, and did not, along with almost everyone else outside the pre-registration list.

~ the dossier ~

~ forty-eight hours in April ~

On 21 April 2026 at eleven in the morning Japan time, the publisher closed OZ Re:write, a different game it had launched in Japan only eight months earlier. Two days after that, on 23 April, it announced that ASTRA would close as well.

The notice avoided numbers. In Korean it said the company had judged it difficult to keep providing a satisfying environment and quality content, and had decided on closure after careful thought. The English version is blunter and reads like it was written by a person: harsh realities, it says, have made it impossible to continue a service worthy of you. Paid item sales stopped after that same day's maintenance, and whatever currency players already held stayed spendable until the end.

The service ran until 12:00 Korean time on 26 June 2026. The websites and the community pages stayed up for three months more and went off together at 03:00 UTC on 28 September, which was also the deadline for claiming a refund on unused Rubies.

~ three years of widening losses ~

The published figures belong to the whole publisher rather than to this one game, and they still explain it. HYBE IM booked ₩57.3 billion of sales in 2024 against a net loss of ₩27.7 billion, with the loss widening each year rather than narrowing, and an accumulated deficit of ₩56.4 billion. Personnel costs had roughly doubled to ₩24.8 billion. Keeping it going took a ₩107.5 billion rights offering in 2024 and another ₩30 billion in April 2025.

Korean reporting through 2025 described a strategic reset as unavoidable after the executive who conceived the games business left and the first publishing title underperformed. The company put its remaining weight behind a large MMORPG and a project still under a codename. Everything already shipped was the part that could be switched off.

~ what the store page says now ~

HYBE IM renamed itself DRIMAGE in the summer of 2025, roughly a year before ASTRA closed, and the Japanese subsidiary followed. Go to the Steam page today and it lists FLINT as developer and DRIMAGE as publisher, a company name that had not been coined when the game came out. The support address in the fine print is still an @hybecorp.com mailbox, which nobody got around to changing.

The store entry has not been pulled. It sits there with its 55% rating and its trailers still playable, carrying no price at all, and the Steam API reports a current player count of zero. FLINT's older game, the one this was a sequel to, is reported to have shut down in August 2025, ten months ahead of its own successor.

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