SoulWorker Academia

~ the goodbye ~

SoulWorker Academia ran in Korean, on Korean stores, for eleven months. The publisher was Korean and the codebase was Chinese, and there was never a route by which any of it reached anywhere else. Even the parent game's western service was a separate operation under separate owners, and Academia was not part of that arrangement at any point.

The parent is SoulWorker, a cel-shaded Korean action MMO about teenagers fighting with weapons made out of their own souls in a world that has mostly ended. Academia took that cast and enrolled it. The launch art described the game as an end-of-the-world MMORPG you meet at school, which is an accurate summary of the tonal problem it had signed up for. It was not a sequel and it was not a port. It was the SoulWorker roster moved into a school building, with dormitories and clubs doing the work that guilds normally do.

Kong You Games built it in China and opened a Chinese server on 19 November 2020. YJM Games took the Korean rights and launched on 1 February 2021 at ten in the morning. Pre-registration had passed seven hundred thousand within six days of opening and a million before release, and on launch day it went to number one on Google Play's popular apps and games list in Korea.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the opening week ~

By 3 February, two days in, Money Today was reporting daily payment volume of around two hundred million won. That is a strong opening for a mid-size Korean publisher, and YJM's own executives had been talking about the game in terms of community rather than revenue, pointing at the dormitory and club systems as the mechanisms that would push players into parties without forcing them.

In the pre-launch interview the business director closed on a line that reads differently now than it did then. He said he had done his best to make a game he would not be ashamed of. Eleven months later he was not the one who got to decide whether it kept running.

~ the server that went first ~

On 24 November 2021 the Chinese server closed, a little over a year after it opened. That was the server belonging to the company that had actually written the game. The sequence matters. The code stopped being maintained underneath YJM, and six days later the publisher told its own players that the Korean service had thirty one days left.

~ the answer from the developer ~

The notice is unusually direct for the format. It says the closure comes down to the developer's circumstances and that the publisher had been unable to provide proper service because of them.

Paid sales stopped the day the notice went up, and unspent Soul Cash was refundable at 18.33 won a unit, claimable right up to the final moment on 31 December. The servers went off at eleven in the morning that Friday, three hundred and thirty three days after they came on.

The line worth keeping is the one in the middle. YJM wrote that it had looked into taking the development code across and running the game itself, and had confirmed this was not realistically possible. A publisher asked for the body so it could keep the thing breathing, and was told the body could not be moved.

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