Bless Online is Finally Shutting Down, to the Surprise of.. Nobody.

Bless Online is Dead.

You read that correctly: Bless Online is, as of September 9th, 2019, officially dead.
The Bless Online team posted an official announcement on Steam with the title “Bless Online Service Closure Announcement,” much to the dismay of the few hundred people left playing it.
Now the point of this isn’t to hate on Neowiz or the Bless Online team, but to merely send Bless offline with one final goodbye video.

The official statement made by Neowiz reads as follows:

To our loyal Bless Online Community,

It has been a little over a year since Bless Online was launched on Steam as an early-access game here in the West.
All of the teams here at Bless Online would like to express our deepest gratitude to our players and supporters.
Unfortunately, after much deliberation and efforts from everyone here at Bless Online, with a heavy heart, we are sad to announce that the Steam online service for Bless Online will close on September 9th, 2019 00:00.

Starting after server maintenance on June 10th, 2019 and until September 8th, 2019 23:59, sales of all digital products within Steam will be disabled, prices of items in the in-game stores will drastically decrease, the entry limits to all Dungeons will be removed, and the Dungeon drop rates will be increased.
Players will also see a 100% increase in Gathering/Mining EXP, Guild EXP, EXP gained from hunting, Dungeon Points, and Combat Points. Gathering, Mining, and Crafting speeds will be increased by 50%.

Finally, we would like to stay connected to our players and supporters through our newsletter by sharing upcoming news and benefits regarding Neowiz games and its future projects.
If you want to stay informed of upcoming news and announcements regarding Neowiz, you can subscribe to our newsletter from our Bless Online official website.

I have a few minor.. concerns with their announcement.
First and foremost is the fact that they’ve yet to address whether or not the cash shop will remain running even though they plan on shutting the game down.
Notice that they make mention of “in-game stores” having “drastically decreased prices,” but no mention of the cash shop items changing?
Traditionally, when an MMO announces their closure they either close the cash shop, often refunding players for the last x amount of weeks worth of purchases, or at the very least they’re made freely available.
Everyone knows that part of Bless’ failure is due to Neowiz’s greed but overall, if the cash shop doesn’t close after this announcement then this is taking things a little too far in my opinion.
I know that Bless was Neowiz’s attempt at milking as much from the game as they could before it had to shut down but sucking the remnants of your playerbase dry is.. well, it just rubs me the wrong way.
These people purchased your product and you treated, and continue to treat them poorly.

Then there’s the matter of asking people to subscribe to their newsletter so Neowiz have a direct method with which to contact you concerning future games.
They take our money with a buy to play model, make the game free to play, take money from players spending money in the cash shop, shut the game down shortly afterwards, then proceed to ask you to stay in contact.
In what world is this an acceptable practice from a developer?

I’m sure you’re capable of imagining exactly how irate the playerbase is both current and former.
The Steam page in the few hours the announcement had been up had upwards of 20 pages worth of people expressing their distaste in how things were handled.
The state of Bless in its current form is lamentable, for sure, but Neowiz brought this upon themselves unfortunately.
With false promises, a lack of functionality and bugs that had long since been fixed in every other version of the game.. its fate was all but a certainty.

Now Neowiz are working with Bandai Namco on the next version of Bless, Bless Unleashed and who knows, the game could end up being a decent MMO.
I honestly hope that Bandai Namco have enough control over Bless Unleashed to assure people that this won’t happen again, but my hopes are very low.

Neowiz launched the game in an incomplete state in every country they could and it failed every single time.
They made a ton of money off of their Western release of the game since we were, and still are so thirsty for a new MMO to sink our time into.

It’s sad to see an MMO shut down but at the same time I’m of the opinion that Neowiz and Bless got what they deserved in the end.
I honestly feel bad for every single person that attempted and failed to obtain a refund when they had the opportunity to.
I don’t like when our community gets scammed out of their money. It’s unsettling that the game is going to remain online for another 3 months and some players won’t even know what’s going on but it can’t be helped.
Hopefully, if you’re a current player of Bless Online and you weren’t aware of its closure, then you’re informed now.

What do you think of Bless shutting down? Are you glad? Upset? Impartial? Let me know in the comments below.

Anyway guys, that’s it for me. Thanks for watching, don’t forget to subscribe for more content like this and I’ll see you all next time, peace!