Elyon

» see elyon.playkakaogames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i missed elyon. by 2020 i was thirty six in ankara with no room for another eight-hour korean mmo grind, and by the time it launched in korea in december that year the whole steampunk-airship pitch it had spent three years promising was gone. what shipped instead was a generic pvp-focused action mmo running on unreal engine 3 in the year unreal 5 was being teased. the western servers were open fourteen months. the last regional server, japan, went off september 2023.

the game had two lives. the first was the hype phase as ascent infinite realm, or A:IR, announced 2017 by bluehole and shown at G-Star with airship pvp footage that looked like nothing else in the category. bluehole, the tera studio, had also just given the world pubg through its subsidiary. expectations for the sequel-adjacent A:IR were high enough that kakao games in korea and korea's mmo press were tracking every closed-beta round.

then in 2020 bluehole rebranded it. the airships were mostly gone. the steampunk aesthetic was toned down into a generic east-asian fantasy setting. the pitch shifted from world-scale airship pvp to realm-vs-realm ground combat between vulpin and ontari. it launched buy-to-play in korea 10 december 2020, went free-to-play for the western release 20 october 2021.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the pivot ~

what killed elyon before it launched was the gap between A:IR-the-promise and elyon-the-product. korean press coverage between 2017 and 2020 had positioned A:IR as an original bluehole IP that would build on the tera engine and animation work while adding a genuinely new steampunk world. what actually arrived in december 2020 shared a UI style with generic korean action mmos and a pvp system that punished casual play. the monetization leaned on progression pass and gacha-style pulls.

the review consensus at western launch in october 2021 was that the combat was competent but the graphics were dated. the endgame grind was structured around forced pvp. by q1 2022 concurrent player counts on steam had dropped under 3,000 daily peak.

~ the actual end ~

kakao games europe announced the NA/EU shutdown 7 september 2022 with the servers going off 7 december 2022. the announcement text cited unsustainable key performance indicators and low retention that made content difficult to clear as active player counts kept dropping. it was a fourteen month western run.

the korean announcement followed a couple of months later. the original server closed 2 march 2023, and asiasoft's southeast asia server went off 27 april 2023. the japanese server, published by neowiz under the pmang brand, was the last one standing and closed 19 september 2023.

~ the long tail ~

the interesting archival note is what bluehole did with the intellectual property afterward. the studio had by then been renamed krafton and reorganized around pubg's continued global revenue. there is no announced successor or spiritual sequel to A:IR. the airship pvp concept, which was the most original thing about the 2017 pitch, did not survive into any other krafton project.

what elyon actually left behind was a case study for the korean mmo press about the risk of pivoting a hyped IP away from its own distinguishing feature. A:IR fans in 2017 wanted airships. elyon in 2021 offered a competent generic action mmo. the audience overlap was smaller than either kakao or bluehole seemed to estimate.

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