If you look at the Reddit of Tera Online you can see several post-mortem feedbacks on why people think it happened.
If you put the general notions together you find the most discussed ones and the ones seen as the biggest issues.
The first was ping issues without a proxy. 25 million registered players and basically Afrixa, East Asia and Australia had a baseline ‘unplayable’ game.
Optimization. Tera was at the times out when Skyrim was big, vastly less models and details but still couldn’t handle even 30 FPS in PvP zones. That was to a large degree because for some ‘smart’ reason they made a x32 version and had no x64 version back then, kinda baffling for the missing support of something that was the basis by then.
Another major was active removal of content.
There were floating guild castles… removed.
Alliances? Removed.
Events? Removed.
Dumbing down leveling process similar to what ‘Star Wars Galaxies’ did… which by the way was a major reason for the ultimate downfall of that game.
Gear progression materials and recipes being removed.
Even so far as removing the parts of the original story.
One of the major issues was their expansion towards level 70 which was not like 1-65 but similar to the top-end grind of Black Desert Online, which - understandably - turned players off from the game, even korean ones. It took them a long while to rework that aspect to add a questline to progress through it in a normal way.
Instead people got non lore-friendly cosmetics and mounts, so basically it become ‘slob’.
Another reason was that a modding group created a proxy server so finally people could play in areas not formerly able to play because of ping issues.
The reaction of the devs was not to praise them, simply disallow the client or take inspiration.
Nono… they banned the inventors and forbade the usage… not that anyone listened anyway for obvious reasons.
A core reason was that Bluehole (the developers back then, owned by Krafton) were focusing on Elyon instead of Tera and kept it in ‘maintenance mode’ basically. Elyon failed, Tera failed as well.
So a myriad of reasons all put together. Major mismanegement, lack of reaction, wrong directions, abundant monetization without care for the world they’re released in.
Then we can move over to PUBG which had their share-prices nosediving massively in 2021 and beyond. India banned PUBG mobile because of security concerns, this changed this years though. Pakistan did the same in 2022.
Cheating is prevalent to a vast degree, this point specifically is mentioned as a core cause of why players move over to Fortnite and Apex Legends rather then staying in PUBG nowadays still.
Not to speak of controversies like the failing of their automated banning system. One such case caused hundreds of people to be banned without fault, making a official apology out about it… and then a week later banning them anyway out of the blue as PUBG wanted to not do any compensation of apologies for the second failure, many left the game there for obvious reasons.
Then they had a viewbot incident as well, 80000 viewers with basically no interactions, sudden influx and no change in chatting speed.
Every single year their tournaments are riddled with hacks and hence repeatedly players which should be banned come out on top to then be disqualified.
They went directly after a leak poster via law, claiming damages. This practice is frowned upon (going after them, not the datamining), as will lawfully it’s seen as damages to the company the business knows full well that it causes massive engagement. This killed off the north american PUBG community which was already struggling. Competition reprimanded them, pro scene officials and commentators went away. Other areas were majorly pissed off as well since they didn’t do anything to the chinese market with the same things happening so their argument of ‘working on principle’ was flawed and dismantled immediately.
That all was before they manipulated payout probabilities. They never noticed anyone despite it being publicly showcased that the system was either bugged or intentionally wrongly set, only Korea got the information about that, that pissed off even more players.
Then we got an instance were a operator abused his position to ban anyone which killed him in-game.
Then we got the controversy of the ‘New Jeans’ collab which once again did mess with the probabilities of return.
I only picked a few of the controversies over the time. Especially the cheating ones in their official tournaments is basically prevalent, happened over and over and over every year.
Yes, it is.
But Krafton is the publisher, they own those companies, they have 100% say in things. It’s their job to push the developers to do the proper things and not make a mess out of stuff, that is included in their job literally.
In case of a publisher the failures of the developers are also the failures of the publisher. Quality assurance is in their job description.
It is, as their job as a publishers include the QA.
And since a substantial part of the reason why the games failed or struggle are related QA it’s Krafton’s fault.
Yes, and I was on the other side of the fence back then. I shrugged my shoulders and knew the chance for nothing bad to happen was massive comparatively to something bad happening because of it.
They have another track record after all.
