Sudden Attack 2

» see sa2.nexon.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Sudden Attack 2 was Korea only at the publishing layer, and it was gone before anyone outside Korea could have signed up. There was a Japanese domain registered and a Japanese publisher lined up. That launch never happened, because by the time it would have, the Korean servers already had a closing date on them.

The first Sudden Attack came out in 2005 and became the thing Korean PC bangs ran. It was free to play and it worked on whatever hardware a cafe already had. For most of a decade it sat near the top of the domestic FPS charts, which in Korea is a serious position to hold.

Nexon GT, which had been GameHi before Nexon absorbed it, built the sequel on Unreal Engine 3. Better graphics and character customization on top of modes that had not changed much. It launched on 6 July 2016 into a market that had been waiting eleven years for it.

I have no standing here beyond the reading. Turkey never had a domestic online game industry with this shape, where a publisher and a developer sign a contract over one title and the title stops existing when the contract does. Games arrived here already finished, from somewhere else, on a disc and later through Steam.

~ the case file ~

~ twenty three days ~

It launched on 6 July. On 30 July, Nexon announced it was shutting the game down. That is twenty three days, and it is the number every Korean outlet led with, because nothing at that budget level had died that quickly before.

The service did not stop that day. Nexon ran it out until 29 September so people could use up what they had bought, which puts the total at eighty five days. The announcement is the real death though. Everything after 30 July was a wind-down with a date printed on it.

~ what actually killed it ~

The official cause is contractual. Nexon GT ended its publishing agreement with Nexon and development stopped along with it. Neither side said much in public about why.

The unofficial causes are easier to see. The launch build had performance problems and the free to play economy landed badly with players who had expected the original's terms. Two weeks in, the game also hit a public argument over how its two main female characters were posed, which ended with Nexon apologizing and deleting those characters from the game. A shooter that removes part of its own cast in week two is not a shooter having a good month.

~ the long tail ~

The original outlived its sequel by years and is still the reference point in Korea. Sudden Attack 2 survives mostly as a statistic, the shortest run any major Korean release has managed.

Nothing was salvaged and no revival exists, because there was never an audience outside Korea to build one from. A game that ran in one country for eighty five days leaves almost nothing behind to preserve, and the Japanese version that would have doubled its reach was cancelled with the servers.

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