En Masse Entertainment

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

~ the last words ~

A Korean MMO reaching the West in the late 2000s usually meant handing it to a publisher who would translate it badly and monetize it worse. Bluehole decided to do the job itself and opened an office in Seattle in June 2008, registered as Bluehole Interactive Inc. and later renamed En Masse Entertainment.

The staff were hired out of the obvious places. People came across from Blizzard and from NCsoft, which is the standard Seattle MMO pedigree. Leadership changed hands in January 2013, when Chris Lee and Soo Min Park took over as chief executive and chief operating officer.

The company's whole existence was arranged around one title. TERA launched in Korea in January 2011, and En Masse spent the next fifteen months localizing it, rewriting it for a western audience and building the server infrastructure to run it before it opened in North America on 1 May 2012.

~ the record ~

~ the game it was built on ~

TERA was a subscription game for less than a year. The free-to-play switch came in February 2013 alongside the TERA: Rising update, with paying subscribers converted to an Elite Status tier that gave perks rather than access. Every piece of content stayed available to everyone, which was not the normal arrangement at the time.

The first expansion, Fate of Arun, arrived on 16 December 2014 with four new zones and a level cap raised to 65, and it was free. Putting the game on Steam on 5 May 2015 with a new gunner class took it to the top of the free-to-play MMORPG list by concurrent players, which is as big as En Masse ever got.

The other games are a catalog of things that did not last. Zombies Monsters Robots, a Chinese shooter the company brought over in 2014, closed in 2017 with a farewell from the publisher that is better written than most: thank you for joining us these past few years, and you have got until Halloween to accomplish your primary mission. Kill. Every. Last. Thing. Two mobile games went out in 2015 and sank without trace. The last signings were licensed work: a Stranger Things tie-in in July 2019 and a strategy game set in the world of The Dark Crystal.

~ the day it stopped ~

On 5 November 2018 Bluehole put all of its subsidiaries sideways under a new parent called Krafton Game Union, which is the kind of corporate reshuffle that reads as nothing at the time. Twenty-one months later, on 17 August 2020, En Masse announced it had begun ceasing operations. No explanation was published then and none has been published since.

By that point the company was running two games: TERA and Closers. Twelve years of work had come down to keeping two live services online for a parent company that had other ways of doing it.

~ where the games went ~

The company stopped. The games did not. Gameforge picked up North American publishing for the PC version of TERA within a few months, while the console versions went back to Krafton's own people. The remaining titles returned to the studios that had made them. Every game it still had on the day it closed outlived it, which is the specific fate of a publisher rather than a developer.

Nothing here had a Turkish edition and nothing here needed one. An MMO published out of Seattle for North American servers is a latency problem from Ankara before it is anything else, and the western MMOs that got played here got played on European shards for that reason. TERA's world was wherever its racks were, and they were never anywhere near this country.

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