The Neowiz Bless Studio, which was specifically founded for the development of Bless Online, will once again be part of the parent company. The change will not initially affect the MMORPG.
What happened? The Korean company Neowiz announced that the Bless Studio will be dissolved on June 19 and the developers will be reintegrated into the parent company. According to the official justification, this should simplify management and increase corporate value.
Originally, the Bless Studio had around 200 employees. How many are still there after the issues and several failed releases in different regions of the world is unknown.
What impact does this have on Bless Online? There is currently no official statement on the future of Bless Online. However, since Neowiz had an influence throughout the development of the game, the cuts may be limited, and operations could continue normally.
This would be different if the entire team were sent to new projects. Then it could even lead to discontinuation. The Bless subreddit is already speculating about a possible end to the MMORPG.
The Round 8 team is also affected by the consolidation. This is a group from the Neowiz Bless Studio that takes care of the console version Bless Unleashed. There has been no statement about the future here either.
The end of Bless Online would surprise few
How has it been recently in Bless Online? Many players expect the end also because updates in Bless Online have been handled very poorly in recent months.
On March 27, there was a server rollback and extended downtimes for the game. For this, the developers even distributed compensations in the form of real money currency.
However, the Update 3.5.0 from April 3 again led to problems. In the following days, there were again many outages, and this time real money currency was distributed again. Even three times compared to the previous outage.
What do the player numbers of Bless Online say? Looking at the Steam charts, you can see that the player numbers of Bless Online are continuously declining.
In the last 30 days, an average of around 360 players played the game simultaneously. At the same time, there were 691 players online at peak times.
In October and November, there was a noticeable upturn in player numbers. At that time, Bless Online had just gone free-to-play, for early access you had to pay, attracting new players. However, the trend in 2019 speaks a clear language.
Servers in other regions already shut down: Not only is the European version of Bless falling short of expectations, but it also performed poorly in other regions. In Russia, the MMORPG did not take off and was discontinued in May 2018.
In Korea, the game lasted a bit longer. There, the servers were only shut down in November.
Last hope Bless Unleashed
If you have enjoyed Bless so far or want to give a better version another chance, you can still hold out hope for Bless Unleashed.
Not the same game: The Xbox version of Bless is said to differ from the previous MMORPG. They are only supposed to resemble each other in terms of graphics, assets, and basic setting.
Bless Unleashed, however, relies on Unreal Engine 4 and a new lore. The game is set in a kind of parallel world. Additionally, the developers are forgoing tab-targeting for the console.
When will Bless Unleashed be released? Originally, Bless Unleashed was supposed to be released according to publisher Bandai Namco still in 2019. The restructuring could change that, but it doesn’t have to.
