Bless Online is shutting down in Japan, guess who’s next in line?

Any hopes that you might have for Bless Online should be dead and buried by now. This once highly anticipated MMORPG shut down in Korea in November 2018 and developer Neowiz stated that the “Steam version would be its sole focus”.

But that made it feel like the Japanese version was being ignored. Bless Online was live in Japan since November 2, 2017 and is going to shut down without much fanfare on August 8, 2019.

With mostly negative reviews and an average player count of around 200 players, the global release of Bless Online isn't going to stay up and running for too long.

Bless Online was the star of one of the most chaotic launches in history of video games. Aeria Games was lined up to be the western publisher but the deal fell through due to “quality concerns.” Apparently, they weren't wrong. Then Neowiz decided to self-publish Bless Online on Steam, but with a brilliant twist – making the game buy-to-play. For such a controversial and problematic game, putting a price tag on it was adding insult to injury.

A few months and many beatings later, not to mention some weird official statements, Bless Online switched to free-to-play. Alas, it was too late, and what was deemed by players as a broken mess of a game ended up seeing its player base decreasing every month.

While Neowiz probably won't sustain Bless Online for long, they are having another go at the franchise with the Xbox One exclusive Bless Unleashed. Published by Bandai Namco, this MMORPG upgrades to Unreal Engine 4 and tries to be the game that the original wasn't. A PlayStation 4 version may already be in development as well.

I don't want to be the pessimistic type, but you know that old saying: fool me once, shame on you…