Bufftoon

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

~ the obit ~

NCSoft makes Lineage, and has made Lineage in one form or another since 1998. The money that built the company came from people paying every month to keep playing it. In December 2013 the same company opened Bufftoon, a webtoon and web novel platform, which is not a game in any sense. Korea's comics market was moving onto phones, the vertical scroll format was turning into a serious export industry, and NCSoft wanted a position in it before the position got expensive.

Bufftoon ran twelve years and reached roughly three thousand titles. Comics were only part of it. Web novels and audiobooks sat in the same catalog. A good share of the catalog was original and exclusive, which is the part a platform pays for so that it has something nobody else can show you. Two of those originals escaped the app: "How to Hate You" became a single-episode television drama, and "The Day After We Broke Up" became a musical. In 2022 Bufftoon ran a content competition with MBC, one of the major Korean broadcasters, which is the behavior of a platform still trying to get bigger.

On 15 May 2025 the shutdown went public with a closing date of 17 December. The wind-down was staged and long. Purchases of paid coins and handouts of free ones had already stopped the day before the announcement, on 14 May. Coins became unusable on 30 June. Refunds covered unused paid coins and, unusually, titles that readers had already bought, with the procedure published on 21 May. After that the service ran another half year with the store switched off.

The stated reason was NCSoft restructuring toward its core gaming business, set against a webtoon market whose growth had slowed. Both halves are true and the second one carries more weight than it first appears. For most of the 2010s Korean webtoon platforms were a growth story, and a game publisher could justify a side business on the strength of the category alone. Once the category flattened, a webtoon platform sitting inside a game company stopped being a position and became a line item.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ reading sideways ~

The vertical scroll comic is a Korean invention that went everywhere, and I have read a fair number of them in English, years late, on services that were not this one. That is the honest position here. Bufftoon was a Korean-language app sitting on a Korean game publisher's account system at bufftoon.plaync.com, behind the same plaync login that Lineage players used. It was never going to appear in Turkey. What I know of its catalog I know because two titles got out into television and theater and were written about in languages I read.

~ the coins ~

Platforms like this run on a token currency, and the token is where a shutdown turns awkward. You buy coins, you spend coins on chapters, and a chapter is a license rather than a file on your device. When the service ends, refunding the unspent coins is the obvious duty. The harder question is what a company owes somebody who already spent theirs on a book they can no longer open.

Bufftoon's answer was to refund purchased titles as well as unused coins. That is more generous than the usual practice. It is also the company conceding what it had actually been selling, which was access for as long as it felt like providing it.

~ what NCSoft kept ~

bufftoon.plaync.com now redirects to nc.com, the corporate site. ArchiveTeam ran a distributed grab ahead of the closing date and saved the platform, so the catalog exists somewhere even though no reader has a route into it. NCSoft went back to making games. Lineage is still running.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »