Devilian

» see devilian.trionworlds.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

My time in persistent worlds was Ultima Online on Turkish private servers, which is a completely different animal from this. Those were free and run by someone in the same country, found through a forum thread, and they died when whoever paid for the box got tired of paying. Devilian died on a corporate calendar, in a press release with a timestamp in Pacific time. I never played it. I am not sure I could have found five people in Ankara in 2016 who had.

It came out of Bluehole Ginno Games in Korea and reached the west through Trion Worlds on 10 december 2015, free to play, on Steam. The pitch was clean enough: an isometric action RPG where you clicked through crowds of monsters, with an MMO wrapped around it so there were other people in the town. Your character carried two forms, human and devil, and each leveled on its own, so progress ran on two tracks and you switched into the demon when the fight got serious.

Critics gave it a 63 on Metacritic across six reviews, which is the score that kills a free game. Nothing was broken. Nothing was worth telling a friend about either, and a free-to-play MMO lives entirely on people telling friends about it, because the business model needs a crowd before it needs a customer.

~ the dossier ~

~ the funny part ~

Bluehole had stopped working on Devilian well before it closed, and the reason was the best possible one. The same company was pouring itself into PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, which arrived in early access in march 2017 and sold tens of millions of copies inside a year. Its other live game, TERA, took what attention was left.

So this is a game that died of its parent's success. Not mismanagement and not a lawsuit: the studio simply found a better use for every single person who might have kept it alive. There is a version of this story where Devilian gets a maintenance team and limps along for a decade. That version needed the studio to stay ordinary.

~ the last six weeks ~

Trion Worlds posted the notice on 19 january 2018 and gave six weeks. The Steam page was already gone by then, so the game spent its last stretch playable but unfindable, which is what a product looks like once the decision is behind it. The farewell text told players they had harnessed their inner strength to vanquish the demons throughout Nala and saved it from utter destruction, which is a strange thing to read in a shutdown notice. The servers went down on 5 march 2018 at 3pm Pacific.

Trion did not outlast it by much. The layoffs came that year and the company was sold to Gamigo in october 2018, which is how the publisher that once ran Rift and Defiance became a name attached to somebody else's catalog. Devilian is the kind of grave that repeats across the mid-2010s: a competent Korean import handed to a western publisher already on the way down, closed after two years when the accounting caught up.

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