Ntreev Soft

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

~ the obit ~

I knew the game for years before I knew the company, which is the usual order for a Korean studio that sold its work to other people's territories instead of to players. Ntreev Soft made PangYa. That is the sentence the rest of this needs first, because almost nobody outside Korea ever learned the name on the door.

The company was incorporated on 1 December 2003 in Seongnam, formed by staff who had walked out of Sonnori. Trickster Online was already live by then, launched in Korea that April, a 2D isometric MMORPG where a serious part of the loop was drilling into the ground for items and experience. PangYa followed in June 2004 and became the thing the studio was known for in every market that licensed it.

Two live games is a thin catalog for twenty years, and Ntreev spent the rest of its life looking for the next one. Super Swing Golf shipped with Tecmo on the Wii, which put the swing on a console. The Pro Baseball H2 and H3 series ran as a domestic mobile business. Trickster:M arrived on phones on 20 May 2021 with more than three hundred thousand people playing at launch, and by that July it was down near eight thousand.

Nothing they built ever reached Turkey under their own name. The one product of theirs that traveled as a boxed object rather than a licensed service went out with Tecmo's logo on the front, which is the studio's whole problem in one line. Everything Ntreev made was a service running on someone else's contract in someone else's country. When those contracts stop, a company like this leaves no shelf behind. It leaves a list of login servers that no longer answer.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the ownership chain ~

Ntreev was independent for less than two years. iHQ took a majority stake in 2005, and when SK Telecom bought iHQ in 2007 a golf game and a drilling MMO ended up inside one of Korea's largest telecom groups. On 15 February 2012 NCSoft bought roughly 98 percent of the company from SK Telecom, and from then on the studio belonged to the publisher of Lineage.

The NCSoft years never produced a profitable one. Operating losses started almost immediately after the acquisition and did not stop for eleven consecutive years. There was a restructuring in 2016 and another in 2022. The 2022 filing showed 6.6 billion won of revenue against 9.8 billion won of operating loss, which is a company losing more than it takes in.

~ the day it died ~

In January 2024 the roughly seventy people still on the payroll were asked to resign. NCSoft confirmed the wind-up on 15 February 2024, twelve years to the day after it had bought the place. Trickster:M and the baseball games went with it, and the Trickster:M servers actually stopped on 13 March.

The coda belongs to Thailand. PangYa had been closing territory by territory since 2016 and one licensed server was still running in Bangkok when the studio was liquidated. It switched off on 30 April 2024, two and a half months after the company that built the game had stopped existing. The game outlived its maker, which is rare, and only by a season.

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