Bless Online

» see blessonline.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Neowiz opened Bless Online in Korea on 27 January 2016 at eight in the morning, across sixteen servers, with seven races and six classes, capped at level 45. More than 200,000 characters had been made in advance during the nine days the creator was open. On its second day it was fourth in the PC-bang charts.

What followed was four endings in four markets. Russia went first: 101XP closed its servers on 25 May 2017 and described it as a pause for revision, having shipped a game that stopped at level 45 of an intended 60. It never came back. Korea closed on 20 November 2018, and the Japanese service that GameOn had launched in November 2017 closed on 8 August 2019, with the only reason any of the publishers gave: at the current state of development, running it at a level that satisfied many players was difficult. The Steam version closed on 9 September 2019.

A Western player buying a founder's pack in May 2018 was buying a game that was two years and four months old. Korea had been playing it since January 2016 and Russia had already shut its servers down. The Steam page said Early Access.

~ the record ~

~ seven years before anyone played it ~

The number everyone cites comes from Neowiz Games chief executive Lee Ki-won, speaking to inews24 a week before the Korean launch: seven years of development and 70 billion won. Western coverage converted that to roughly 61 million dollars and repeated it for the next three years, usually as a measure of how much had been lost.

Korea got an attempted rescue in between. An August 2017 relaunch went out under the name Rebuild Project, the standard Korean move for an MMO whose first year went badly, and it bought the service fifteen more months.

~ the refund that came back as an item ~

Founder's packs went on sale at 10:00 Pacific on 28 May 2018, each including a two-day head start, and the Early Access build opened to everyone two days later. Inside those two days Neowiz had to pull the Deluxe and Collector's packs off the store and explain why in public. A buyer could purchase the Collector's Edition and keep the items it granted, then refund the purchase through Steam and buy the cheapest pack back with everything still in hand. The company said it was working with Valve on the problem.

The refunds that mattered more were the ordinary ones. Players who felt the Early Access label had been buried under a game already two years old in Asia asked for their money back in large numbers, and Neowiz apologized and handed out 2,450 Lumena to everyone who had bought inside a particular forty-eight-hour window. By 23 October 2018, the day it turned free to play, the Steam rating had settled at Mostly Negative: 39 percent positive across 10,076 reviews.

~ the welcome pack ~

Korean players were treated better than anyone else. That is what makes the ending there so strange. Their paid items were converted into Pmang cash and paid out in a lump on the closing day. Those who had logged in within the previous year also got a coupon called the Steam Welcome Pack, and on 6 December 2018 Neowiz lifted the Steam version's Korea region lock and put Korean language support on it. The compensation for the shutdown was a free move onto another copy of the same game. That copy was switched off on 9 September 2019, nine months and twenty days after the service it was compensating for.

~ what the founders were left holding ~

The closing FAQ is unusually blunt for a document of its kind. Asked what the shutdown meant, it answered that the game service would no longer continue and that you would not be able to download or play the game. Asked about refunds for recent purchases, it pointed at Valve and Valve's refund policy. Unspent currency was not refunded; instead the store discounted everything heavily so people could spend it down before the lights went out. Expired premium memberships could not be renewed, and the substitute was a buff applied to the whole server. Of the 84 people who rated that FAQ, 12 found it helpful.

Lifetime Premium Membership had been one of the Collector's-tier rewards handed out at the free-to-play conversion, and it ran for ten months and seventeen days. blessonline.net now redirects to a career-coaching site. The name is not dead, though, and the distinction matters here: Bless Unleashed was still being patched on Steam in October 2026, under a publisher called VALOFE. What is buried in this grave is the original service.

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