After ten years, Korean MMO ArcheAge is closing its European and North American servers
They'll shut down in June
We haven't written much about Korean MMO ArcheAge since reviewing it nine years ago, and there won't be many future opportunities to write about it, either. Its developers have announced that its European and North American servers will shut down on June 27th.
"After discussing the performance of ArcheAge with XL Games at length, we have concluded that we’re no longer able to provide the MMORPG we envisioned. The declining number of active players means the game’s content is no longer accessible in the way it used to be, and the experience of it is different from what was originally intended," says termination of service announcement. "In light of this, we’ve made the difficult decision to terminate the live service of ArcheAge in Europe and North America."
The servers will shut down at 9am BST on June 27th, 2024. Customer support for European and North American players will remain active until September 27th.
Once the servers go offline, player information will be deleted. The servers will remain online in other regions, but a FAQ under the announcement says the operators of the games in those regions have "implemented IP blocks", and it isn't possible to transfer accounts between regions.
ArcheAge was directed by Jake Song, who previously led the design of classic MMORPG Lineage, under his studio XLGames. It was originally operated in western regions by MMO studio Trion Worlds, until those efforts were taken over by XLGames parent company Kakao. XLGames announced development of ArcheAge 2 in 2020, although more recently they've seemingly been dedicating their attention to ArcheWorld, an NFT-powered mobile MMO. Woof.